The Quiet American

THE

^UIET AMERICAN

by

GRAHAM GREENE

WILLIAM IILINEMANN LTD
mi i bourne :: LONDON :: iokonio

FIRST PUBLISHED 1915

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
AT THE WINDMILL PRESS
KINGSWOOD, SURREY

Dear Ren£ and Phuong,

I have asked permission to dedicate this book to
you not only in memory of the hagpy evenings I
have spent with you in Saigon over the last five years,
but also because I have quite shamelessly borrowed
the location of your flat to house one of iny characters,
and your name, Phuong, for the convenience of
readers because it is simple, beautiful and easy to
pronounce, which is not true of all your couiftry-
women’s names. You will both realise I have
borrowed little else, certainly not the characters of
anyone in Viet Nam. Pyle, Granger, Fowler, Vigot,
Joe— these have had no originals in the life of Saigon
or Hanoi, and General The is dead : shot in the back,
so thfcy say. Even the historical events have been
rearranged. For example, the big bomb near the
Continental preceded and did not follow the bicycle
bombs. I have no scruples about such small changes.
This is a story and not a piece of history, and I hope
that as a story about a few imaginary characters it
will pass for both of you one hot Saigon evening.

Yours affectionately,

Graham Greene

“I do not like being moved: for the will is excited;
and action

Is a most dangerous thing; I tremble for something
factitious,

Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process;
We’re so prone to these things, with our terrible
notions of duty.”

A. H. Clough

“This is the patent age of new inventions
For killing bodies, and for saving souls,

All propagated with the best intentions.”

Byron

PARI ONE

CHAPTER I

After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my
room over the rue Catinat: he had said, “I’ll be
with you at latest by ten,” and when midnight had
struck I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and went
down into the street. A lot of old women in black
trousers squatted on the landing: it was February and
I suppose too hot for them in bed. One trishaw
driver pedalled slowly by towards the river front
and I could see lamps burning where they had
disembarked the new American planes. There was
no sign of Pyle anywhere in the long street.

Of course, I told myself, he might have been
detained for some reason at the American Legation,
but Surely in that case he would have telephoned
to the restaurant — he was very meticulous about
small courtesies. I turned to go indoors when I saw
a girl waiting in the next doorway. I couldn’t see
her face, only the white silk trousers and the long
flowered robe, but I knew her for all that. She had
so often waited for me to come home at just this
plate and hour.

“Phuong,” I said — which means Phoenix, but
nothing nowadays is fabulous and nothing rises from
its ashes. I knew before she had time to tell me that
she was waiting for Pyle. “He isn’t here.”

3

“Je sais. Je t’ai vu seul a la fenetre.”

“You may as well wait upstairs,” I said. “He will
be coming soon.”

“I can wait here.”

“Better not. The police might pick you up.”

She followed me upstairs. I thought of several
ironic and unpleasant jests I might make, but neither
her English nor her French would have been good
enough for her to understand the irony, and, strange
to say, I had no desire to hurt her or even to hurt
myself. When we reached the landing all the old
women turned their heads, and as soon as we had
passed their voices rose and fell as though they were
singing together.

“What are they talking about?”

“Vhcy think I have come home.”

Inside my room the tree I had set up weeks ago
for the Chinese New Year had shed* most of its
yellow blossoms. They had fallen between the keys
of my typewriter. I picked them out. “Tu «s
trouble,” Phuong said.

“It’s unlike him. He’s such a punctual man. 5 *

I took off my tie and my shoes and lay down on
the bed. Phuong lit the gas stove and began to boil
the water for tea. It might have been six montlrs
ago. “He says you arc going away soon now,” she
said.

“Perhaps.”

“He is very fond of you.”

“Thank him for nothing,” I said.

I saw that she was doing her hair differently,
allowing it to fall black and straight over her
shoulders. I remembered that Pyle had once criticised

4

the elaborate hairdressing which she thought became
the daughter of a mandarin. I shut my eyes and she
was again the same as she used to be: she was the
hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain
hour of the night and the promise of rest.

“He will not be long,” she said as though I needed
comfort for his absence.

I wondered what they talked about together:
Pyle was very earnest and I had suffered from his
lectures on the Far East, which he had known for as
many months as I had years. democracy was
another subject of Ills, and he had pronounced
and aggravating views on what the United States
was doing for the world. Phuong on the other hand
was wonderfully ignorant: if Hitler had come into
the conversation she would have interrupted to
ask who he was. The explanation would be made
more difficult because she had never met a German or
a Pole and had only the vaguest knowledge of Euro-
pean geography, though about Princess Margaret
of course she knew more than I. I heard her put
a trfty down on the end of the bed.

“Is he still in love with you, Phuong?”

To take an Annamite to bed with you is like
taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow.
There had been a time when I thought none of
their voices sang like Phuong’s. I put out my hand
and touched her arm — their bones too were as
fragile as a bird’s.

“Is he, Phuong?”

She laughed and I heard her strike a match. “In
love?” — perhaps it was one of the phrases she didn’t
understand.

5

“May I make your pipe?” she asked.

When I opened my eyes she had lit the lamp and
the tray was already prepared. The lamplight made
her ‘skin the colour of dark amber as she bent over
the flame with a frown of concentration, heating
the small paste of opium, twirling her needle.

“Does Pyle still not smoke?” I asked her.

“No.”

“You ought to make him or he won’t come back.”
It was a superstition among them that a lover who
smoked would always return, even from France. A
man’s sexual capacity might be injured by smoking,
but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent
lover. Now she was kneading the little ball of hot
paste on the convex margin of the bowl and I could
smell*" the opium. There is no smell like it. Beside
the bed my alarm clock showed twelve-twenty, but
already my tension was over. Pyle had»diminished.
The lamp lit her face as she tended the long pipe,
bent above it with the serious attention she might
have given to a child. I was fond of my pipe: more
than two feet of straight bamboo, ivory at either tnd.
Two-thirds of the way down was the bowl, like a
convolvulus reversed, the convex margin polished
and darkened by the frequent kneading of the opium.
Now with a flick of the wrist she plunged the needle
into the tiny cavity, released the opium and
reversed the bowl over the flame, holding the pipe
steady for me. The bead of opium bubbled gendy
and smoothly as I inhaled.

The practised inhaler can draw a whole pipe
down in one breath, but I always had to take
several pulls. Then I lay back, with my neck on the

6

leather pillow, while she prepared the second pipe.

I said, “You know, really, it’s as clear as daylight.
Pyle knows I smoke a few pipes before bed, and he
doesn’t want to disturb me. He’ll be round in the
morning.”

In went the needle and I took my second pipe.
As I laid it down, I said, “Nothing to worry about.
Nothing to worry about at all.” I took a sip of tea
and held my hand in the pit of her arm. “When
you left me,” I said, “it was lucky I had this to fall
back on. There’s a good house in tfie rue d’Ormay.
What a fuss we Europeans make about nothing,
^ou shouldn't live with - a man who doesn’t smoke*
Phuong.”

“But he’s going to marry me,” she said. “Soon
now.”

“Of course, that’s another matter.”

“Shall I make your pipe again?”

“Yes.”

I wondered whether she would consent to sleep
with me that night if Pyle never came, but I knew
that* when I had smoked four pipes I should no
longer want her. Of course it would be agreeable
to feel her thigh beside me in the bed — she always
slept on her back, and when I woke in the morning
I could start the day with a pipe, instead of with my
own company. “Pyle won t come now,” I said.
“Stay here, Phuong.” She held the pipe out to me
and shook her head. By the time I had drawn the
opium in, her presence or absence mattered very
little.

“Why is Pyle not here?” she asked.

“How do I know?” I said.

7

“Did he go to see General Th#”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“He told me if he could not have dinner with you,
he would come here.”

“Don’t worry. He’ll come. Make me another
pipe.” When she bent over the flame the poem of
Baudelaire’s came into my mind: “Mon enfant, ma
soeur . . . How did it go on?

“Aimer a loisir,

Aimer et mourir
Au pays qui te resscmble.”

Out on the waterfront slept the ships, “dont l’humeur
est vagabonde.” I thought that if I smelt her skin it
woufd have the faintest fragrance of opium, and her
colour was that of the small flame. I had seen the
flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north,
she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted
to go home.

“I wish f were Pyle,” I said aloud, but the pain
was limited and bearable — the opium saw to that.
Somebody knocked on the door.

“Pyle,” she said.

“No. It’s not his knock.”

Somebody knocked again impatiently. She got
quickly up, shaking the yellow tree so that it
showered its petals again over my typewriter. The
door opened. “Monsieur Foulair,” a voice com-
manded.

“I’m Fow'ler,” I said. I was not going to get up
for a policeman — I could see his khaki shorts
without lifting my head.

8

He explained in almost unintelligible Vietnamese
French that I was needed immediately — at once —
rapidly — at the Surety.

“At the French Surety or the Vietnamese?”

“The French.” In his mouth the word sounded
Jike “Frangung.”

“What about?”

He didn’t know: it was his orders to fetch me.
“Toi aussi,” he said to Phuong.

“Say vous when you speak to a lady,” I told him.
“How did you know she was herc?’^

He only repeated that they were his orders.

“I’ll come in the morning.”

“Sur le chung,” he said, a little neat, obstinate
figure. There wasn’t any point in arguing, so I got
up and put on my tie and shoes. Here the police
had the last word: they could withdraw my order of
circulation: they could have me barred from Press
Conferences: they could even, if they chose, refuse
me an exit permit. These were the open legal
methods, but legality was not essential in a country
at \var. I knew a man who had suddenly and
inexplicably lost his cook — he had traced him to the
Vietnamese Surety, but the officers there assured
him that he had been released after questioning.
His family never saw him again: perhaps he had
joined the Communists: perhaps he had been enlisted
in one of the private armies which flourished round
Saigon — the Hoa-Haos or the Caodalsts or General
The. Perhaps he was in a French prison. Perhaps
he was happily making money out of girls in Cholon,
the Chinese suburb. Perhaps his heart had given
way when they questioned him. I said? “I’m not

9

going to walk. You’ll have to pay for a trishaw.”
One had to keep one’s dignity.

That was why I refused a cigarette from the
French officer at the Surety. After three pipes I felt
my mind clear and alert: it could take such decisions
easily without losing sight of the main question —
what do they want from me? I had met Vigot
before several times at parties — I had noticed him
because he appeared incongruously in love with his
wife, who ignored him, a flashy and false blonde.
Now it was two in the morning and he sat tired and
depressed in the cigarette smoke and the heavy
heat, wearing a green eye-shade, and he had a
volume of Pascal open on his desk to while away the
time. When I refused to allow him to question
Phuong without me he gave way at once, with a
single sigh that might have represented his weariness
with Saigon, with the heat, or with the whole human
condition.

He said in English, “I’m so sorry I had to ask
you to come,!’

“I wasn’t asked. I was ordered.”

“Oh, these native police — they don’t understand.”
His eyes were on a page of Les Pensies as though
he were still absorbed in those sad arguments.
“I wanted to ask you a few questions — about
Pyle.”

“You had better ask him the questions.”

He turned to Phuong and interrogated her
sharply in French. “How long have you lived with
Monsieur Pyle?”

“A month — I don’t know,” she said.

“How much has he paid you?”

10

“You’ve no right to ask her that,” I said. “She’s
not for sale.”

“She used to live with you, didn’t she?” he asked
abruptly. “For two years.”

“I’m a correspondent who’s supposed to report
your war — when you let him. Don’t ask me to
contribute to your scandal sheet as well.”

“What do you know about Pyle? Please answer
my questions, M. Fowler. I don’t want to ask them.
But this is serious. Please believe me it is very
serious.”

“I’m not an informer. You know all I can tell
you about Pyle. Age thirty-two, employed in the
Economic Aid Mission, nationality American.”

“You sound like a friend of his,” Vigot said,
looking past me at Phuong. A native policeman
came in with three cups of black coffee.

“Or would you rather have tea?” Vigot asked.

“I am a friend,” I said. “Why not? I shall be
going home one day, won’t I? I can’t take her with
me. She’ll be all right with him. It’s a reasonable
arrangement. And he’s going to marry her, he says.
He might, you know. He’s a good chap in his way.
Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the
Continental. A quiet American,” I summed him
precisely up as I might have said, ‘a blue lizard,* ‘a
white elephant.’

Vigot said, “Yes.” He seemed to be looking for
words on his desk with which to convey his meaning
as precisely as I had done. “A very quiet American.”
He sat there in the little hot office waiting for one
of us to speak. A mosquito droned to the attack, and I
watched Phuong. Opium makes you quick-witted —

u

perhaps only because it calms the nerves and stills the
emotions. Nothing, not even death, seems so impor-
tant. Phuong, I thought, had not caught his tone,
melancholy and final, and her English was very bad.
While she sat there on the hard office chair, she was
still waiting patiently for Pyle. I had at that
moment given up waiting, and I could see Vigot
taking those two facts in.

“How did you meet him first?” Vigot asked me.

Why should I explain to him that it was Pyle
who had met rfle? I had seen him last September
coming across the square towards the bar of the
Continental: an unmistakably young and unused
face flung at us like a dart. With his gangly legs
and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed ,
incapable of harm. The tables on the street were
most of them full. “Do you mind?” he had asked
with serious courtesy. “My name’s Pyle. I’m new
here,” and he had folded himself around a chair
and ordered a beer. Then he looked quickly up
into the hard, noon glare.

“Was that a grenade?” he asked with excitement
and hope.

“Most likely the exhaust of a car,” I said, and was
suddenly sorry for his disappointment. One forgets
so quickly one’s own youth: once I was interested
myself in what for want of a better term they call
news. But grenades had staled on me; they were
something listed on the back page of the local paper
— so many last night in Saigon, so many in Cholon:
they never made the European Press. Up the street
came the lovely flat figures — the white silk trousers,
the long tight jackets in pink and mauve patterns

12

slit up the thigh: I watched them with the nostalgia
I knew I would feel when I had left these regions
for ever. “They are lovely, aren’t they?” I Said over
my beer, and Pyle cast them a cursory glance as
they went on up the rue Catinat.

“Oh, sure,” he said indifferendy: he was a serious
type. “The Minister’s very concerned about these
grenades. It would be very awkward, he says, if there
was an incident — with one of us, I mean.”

“With one of you? Yes, I suppose that would
be serious. Congress wouldn’t like it.” Why does
one want to tease the innocent? Perhaps only
ten days ago he had been walking back across
the Common in Boston, his arms full of the books
he had been reading in advance on the Far # East
and the problems of China. lie didn’t even hear
what I said: he was absorbed already in the dilemmas
of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West:
he was determined — I learnt that very soon — to
do good, not to any individual person but to a
country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in
his ‘element now with the whole universe to im-
prove.

“Is he in the mortuary?” I asked Vigot.

“How did you know he was dead?” It was a
foolish policeman’s question unworthy of the man
who read Pascal, unworthy also of the man who so
strangely loved his wife. You cannot love without
intuition.

“Not guilty,” I said. I told myself that it was
true. Didn’t Pyle always go his own way? I looked
for any feeling in myself, even resentment at a
policeman’s suspicion, but I could find none. No

13

one but Pyle was responsible. Aren’t we all better
dead? the opium reasoned within me. But I looked
cautiously at Phuong, for it was hard on her. She
must have loved him in her way: hadn’t she been
fond of me and hadn’t she left me for Pyle? She had
attached herself to youth and hope and seriousness
and now they had failed her more than age and
despair. She sat there looking at the two of us and I
thought she had not yet understood. Perhaps it
would be a goo<^ thing if I could get her away before
the fact got home. I was ready to answer any
questions if I could bring the interview quickly and
still ambiguously to an end, so that I might tell her
later, in private, away from a policeman’s eye and the
hard^ office chairs and the bare globe where the
moths circled.

I said to Vigot, “What hours are you interested
in?”

“Between six and ten.”

“I had a drink at the Continental at six. The
waiters will remember. At six forty-five I walked
down to the quay to watch the American plhnes
unloaded. I saw Wilkins of the Associated News by
the door of the Majestic. Then I went into the
cinema next door. They’ll probably remember —
they had to get me change. From there I took a
trishaw to the Vieux Moulin — I suppose I arrived
about eight thirty — and had dinner by myself.
Granger was there — you can ask him. Then I tdtok
a trishaw back about a quarter to ten. You could
probably find the driver. I was expecting Pyle at
ten, but he didn’t turn up.”

“Why were you expecting him?”

*4

“He telephoned me. He said he had to see me
about something important.”

“Have you any idea what?”

“No. Everything was important to Pyle.”

“And this girl of his?— do you know where she was?”

“She was waiting for him outside at midnight. She
was anxious. She knows nothing. Why, can’t vou
see she’s waiting for him still?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And you can’t really believe I killed him for
jealousy — or she for what? — he was*going to marry
her.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you find him?”

“He was in the water under the bridge to Dakow.”

The Vieux Moulin stood beside the 'bridge.
There were armed police on the bridge and the
restaurant had an iron grille to keep out grenades.
It wasn’t safe to cross the bridge at night, for all the
far side of the river was in the hands of the Vietminh
after dark. I must have dined within fifty yards of
his body.

“The trouble was,” I said, “he got mixed up.”

“To speak plainly,” Vigot said, “I am not alto-
gether sorry. He was doing a lot of harm.”

“God save us always,” I said, “from the innocent
and the good.”

“The good?”

WYcs, good. In his way. You’re a Roman
Catholic. You wouldn’t recognise his way. And
anyway, he was a damned Yankee.”

“Would you mind identifying him? I’m sorry.
It’s a routine, not a very nice routine.”

15

I didn’t bother to ask him why he didn’t wait for
someone from the American Legation, for I knew
the reason. French methods are a little old-
fashioned by our cold standards: they believe in the
conscience, the sense of guilt, a criminal should be
confronted with his crime, for he may break down
and betray himself. I told myself again I was
innocent, while he went down the stone stairs to
where the refrigerating plant hummed in the
basement.

They pulled fiim out like a tray of ice-cubes, and
I looked at him. The wounds were frozen into
placidity. I said, “You see, they don’t re-open in
my presence.”

“Comment?”

“Isn’t that one of the objects? Ordeal by some-
thing or other? But you’ve frozen him stiff. They
didn’t have deep freezes in the Middle Ages.”

“You recognise him?”

“Oh yes.”

He looked, more than ever out of place: he should
have stayed at home. I saw him in a family Snap-
shot album, riding on a dude ranch, bathing on
Long Island, photographed with his colleagues in
some apartment on the twenty-third floor. He
belonged to the sky-scraper and the express lift, the
ice-cream and the dry Martinis, milk at lunch, and
chicken sandwiches on the Merchant Limited.

“He wasn’t dead from this,” Vigot said, pointing
at a wound in the chest. “He was drowned in the
mud. We found the mud in his lungs.”

“You work quickly.”

“One has to in this climate.”

16

They pushed the tray back and closed the door.
The rubber padded.

“You can’t help us at all?” Vigot asked.

“Not at all.”

I walked back with Phuong towards my flat: I
was no longer on my dignity. Death takes away
vanity — even the vanity of the cuckold who mustn’t
show his pain. She was still unaware of what it was
about, and I had no technique for telling her slowly
and gently. I was a correspondent: I thought in
headlines. “American official murdered in Saigon.”
Working on a newspaper one does not learn the way
to break bad news, and even now I had to think of
my paper and to ask her, “Do you mind stopping at
the cable office?” I left her in the street and sent my
wire and came back to her. It was only a 'gesture:
I knew too well that the French correspondents
would already be informed, or if Vigot had
played fair (which was possible), then the censors
would hold my telegram till the French had filed
theirs. My paper would get the news first under a
Parfs date line. Not that Pyle was very important.
It wouldn’t have done to cable the details of his
true career, that before he died he had been respon-
sible for at least fifty deaths, for it would have
damaged Anglo-American relations, the Minister
would have been upset. The Minister had a great
respect for Pyle — Pyle had taken a good degree in —
wtll, one of those subjects Americans can take degrees
in: perhaps public relations or theatrccraft, perhaps
even Far Eastern studies (he had read a lot of books).

“Where is Pyle?” Phuong asked. “What did they
want?”

17

“Come home,” I said.

“WiU Pyle come?”

“He’s as likely to come there as anywhere else.”

The old women were still gossiping on the landing,
in the relative cool. When I opened my door I
could tell my room had been searched: everything
was tidier than I ever left it.

“Another pipe?” Phuong asked.

“Yes.”

I took off my tie and my shoes; the interlude was
over: the night was nearly the same as it had been.
Phuong crouched at the end of the bed and lit the
lamp. Mon enfant, ma soeur — skin the colour of
amber. Sa douce langue natale.

“Phuong,” I said. She was kneading the opium
on the bowl. “II cst mort, Phuong.” She held the
needle in her hand and looked up at me like a child
trying to concentrate, frowning. “Tu dis?J’

“Pyle est mort. Assassine.”

She put the needle down and sat back on her
heels, looking, at me. There was no scene, no tears,
just thought — the long private thought of somcBody
who has to alter a whole course of life.

“You had better stay here tonight,” I said.

She nodded and taking up the needle began
again to heat the opium. That night I woke from
one of those short deep opium sleeps, ten minutes
long, that seem a whole night’s rest, and found my
hand where it had always lain at night, between her
legs. She was asleep and I could hardly hear her
breathing. Once again after so many months I was
not alone, and yet I thought suddenly with anger,
remembering Vigot with his eye-shade in the police

18

station and the quiet corridors of the Legation with
no one about and the soft hairless skin under my
hand. Am I the only one who really cared for
Pyle?

*9

CHAPTER II

(0

The morning Pyle arrived in the square by the
Continental I tiad seen enough of my American
colleagues of the Press, big, noisy, boyish and middle-
aged, full of sour cracks against the French, who were,
when all was said, fighting this war. Periodically,
after an engagement had been tidily finished and
the Casualties removed from the scene, they would
be summoned to Hanoi, nearly four hours’ flight
aw r ay, addressed by the Cominander-in-Chief, lodged
for one night in a Press Camp where they boasted
that the barman was the best in Indo-China, flown
over the late battlefield at a height of 3,000 feet (the
limit of a heavy machine-gun’s range) and then
delivered safely and noisily back, like a school treat,
to the Continental Hotel in Saigon.

Pyle was quiet, he seemed modest, sometimes thai
first day I had to lean forward to catch what he was
saying. And he was very, very serious. Several
times he seemed to shrink up within himself at the
noise of the American Press on the terrace ab«ve
— the terrace which was popularly believed to
be safer from hand-grenades. But he criticised
nobody.

“Have you read York Harding?” he asked.

“No. No, I don’t think so. What did he write?”

He gazed at a milk bar across the street and said
dreamily, “That looks like a good soda-fountain.” I
wondered what depth of homesickness lay behind
his odd choice of what to observe in a scene so
unfamiliar. But hadn’t I on my first walk up the
rue Catinat noticed first the shop with the Guerlain
perfume and comforted myself with the thought that,
after all, Europe was only distant thirty hours? He
looked reluctantly away from the milk bar and said,
“York wrote a book called The Advdflce of Red China.
It’s a very profound book.”

“I haven’t read it. Do you know him?”

He nodded solemnly and lapsed into silence. Bui
he broke it again a moment later to modify the
impression he had given. “I don’t know him Wbll,”
he said. “I guess I only met him twice.” I liked
him for that — to consider it was boasting to claim
acquaintance with — what was his name? — York
Harding. I was to learn later that he had an
enormous respect for what he called serious writers.
That term excluded novelists, poets and dramatists
unless they had what he called a contemporary
theme, and even then it was better to read the
straight stuff as you got it from York.

I said, “You know, if you live in a place for long
you cease to read about it.”

“Of course I always like *o know what the man
onrfhe spot has to say,” he replied guardedly.

“And then check it with York?”

“Yes.” Perhaps he had noticed the irony, because
he added with his habitual politeness, “I’d take it as
a very great privilege if you could find time to brief

21

me on the main points. You see, York was here
more than two years ago.”

I liked his loyalty to Harding — whoever Harding
was. It was a change from the denigrations of the
Pressmen and their immature cynicism. I said,
“Have another bottle of beer and I’ll try to give you
an idea of things.”

I began, while he watched me intently like a
prize pupil, by explaining the situation in the North,
in Tonkin, where the French in those days were
hanging on to* the delta of the Red River, which
contained Hanoi and the only northern port,
Haiphong. Here most of the rice was grown, and
when the harvest was ready the annual battle for
the rice always began.

“That’s the North,” I said. “The French may
hold, poor devils, if the Chinese don’t come to help
the Vietminh. A war of jungle and mountain and
marsh, paddy fields where you wade shoulder-high
and the enemy simply disappear, bury their arms,
put on peasant dress. . . . But you can rot com-
fortably in the damp in Hanoi. They don’t throw
bombs there. God knows why. You could call it a
regular war.”

“And here in the South?”

“The French control the main roads until seven
in the evening: they control the watch towers after
that, and the cities — part of them. That doesn’t
mean you are safe, or there wouldn’t be iron grilles
in front of the restaurants.”

How often I had explained all this before. I was
a record always turned on for the benefit of new-
comers — the visiting Member of Parliament, the
. 22

new British Minister. Sometimes I would wake up
in the night saying, “Take the case of the Caodaists.”
Or the Hoa-Haos or the Binh Xuyen, all the private
armies who sold their services for money or revenge.
Strangers found them picturesque, but there is
nothing picturesque in treachery and distrust.

“And now,” 1 said, “there’s General The. He was
Gaodaist Chief of Staff, but he’s taken to the hills to
fight both sides, the French, the Communists. . . .”

“York,” Pyle said, “wrote that what the East
needed was a Third Force.” Perhaps I should have
seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a
phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column,
Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all
of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realised the
direction of that indefatigable young brain. 'But I
left him with the arid bones of background and took
my daily walk up and down the rue Gatinat. He
would have to learn for himself the real background
that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice-
fields under a flat late sun: the fishers’ fragile cranes
hovering over the fields like mosquitoes: the cups of
tea on an old abbot’s platform, with his bed and his
commercial calendars, his buckets and broken cups
and the junk of a lnctime washed up around his
chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road
where a mine had burst: the gold and the young
green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the
north the deep browns and the black clothes and the
circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes.
When I first came I counted the days of my assign-
ment, like a schoolboy marking off the days of term;
I thought I was tied to what left of a Bloomsbury

23

square and the 73 bus passing the portico of Euston
and springtime in the local in Torrington Place.
Now the bulbs would be out in the square garden,
and I didn’t care a damn. I wanted a day punc-
tuated by those quick reports that might be car
exhausts or might be grenades, I wanted to keep the
sight of those silk-trousered figures moving with
grace through the humid noon, I wanted Phuong,
and my home had shifted its ground eight thousand
miles.

1 turned at the High Commissioner’s house, where
the Foreign Legion stood on guard in their white
k£pis and their scarlet epaulettes, crossed by the
Cathedral and came back by the dreary wall of the
Vietnamese Surety that seemed to smell of urine and
injustice. And yet that too was a part of home, like
the dark passages on upper floors one avoided in
childhood. The new dirty magazines weje out on the
bookstalls near the quay — Tabu and Illusion, and the
sailors were drinking beer on the pavement, an easy
mark for a home-made bomb. I thought of Phuong,
who would be haggling over the price of fish in the
third street down on the left before going for her
elevenses to the milk bar (I always knew where she
was in those days), and Pyle ran easily and naturally
out of my mind. I didn’t even mention him to
Phuong, when we sat down to lunch together in our
room over the rue Catinat and she wore her best
flowered silk robe because it was two years to atday
since wc had met in the Grand Monde in Cholon.

24

( 2 )

Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on
the morning after his death. Phuong had risen before
I was properly awake and had our tea ready. One
is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me
that morning to take up our old life together.

“Will you stay tonight?” I asked Phuong over the
croissants as casually as I could.

“I will have to fetch my box.”

“The police may be there,” I said. “I had better
come with you.” It was the nearest we came that
day to speaking of Pyle.

Pyle had a flat in a new villa near the rue
Duranton, off one of those main streets which* the
French continually subdivided in honour of their
generals— so that the rue de Gaulle became after
the third intersection the rue Leclerc, and that
again sooner or later would probably turn abruptly
into the rue de Lattre. Somebody important must
have toeen arriving from Europe by air, for there was
a policeman facing the pavement every twenty
yards along the route to the High Commissioner’s
Residence.

On the gravel drive to Pyle’s apartment were
several motor-cycles and a Vietnamese policeman
examined my press card. He wouldn’t allow Phuong
into the house, so I. went in search of a French officer.
In Pyle’s bathroom Vigot was washing his hands
with Pyle’s soap and drying them on Pyle’s towel.
His tropical suit had a stain of oil on the sleeve—
Pyle’s oil, 1 supposed.

25

B

“Any news?” I asked.

“We found his car in the garage. It’s empty of
petrol. He must have gone offlast night in a trishaw
— or in somebody elsc’s car. Perhaps the petrol was
drained away.”

“He might even have walked,” I said. “You
know what Americans are.”

“Your car was burnt, wasn’t it?” he went thought-
fully on. “You haven’t a new one?”

“No.”

“It’s not an Important point.”

“No.”

“Have you any views?” he asked.

“Too many,” I said.

“Tell me.”

‘*vVell, he might have been murdered by the
Vietminh. They have murdered plenty of people in
Saigon. His body was found in the yver by the
bridge to Dakow — Vietminh territory when your
police withdraw at night. Or he might have been
killed by thp Vietnamese Surete — it’s been known.
Perhaps they didn’t like his friends. Perhaps he was
killed by the Caodaists because he knew General
The.”

“Did he?”

“They say so. Perhaps he was killed by General
The because he knew the Caodaists. Perhaps he was
killed by the Hoa-Haos for making passes at the
General’s concubines. Perhaps he was just killed by
someone who wanted his money.”

“Or a simple case of jealousy,” Vigot said.

“Or perhaps by the French Surety,” I continued,
“because they didn’t like his contacts. Are you

26

really looking for the people who killed him?”

“No,” Vigot said. “I’m just making a report,
that’s all. So long as it’s an act of war — well, there
are thousands killed every year.”

“You can rule me out,” I said. “I’m not involved.
Not involved,” I repeated. It had been an article of
my creed. The human condition being what it was,
let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I
would not be involved. My fellow journalists called
themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of
reporter. I wrote what I saw: I took no action —
even an opinion is a kind of action.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’ve come for Phuong’s belongings. Your police
wouldn’t let her in.”

“Well, let us go and find them.”

“It’s nice of you, Vigot.”

Pyle had two rooms, a kitchen and bathroom. We
went to the bedroom. I knew where Phuong would
keep her box — under the bed. We pulled it out
together; it contained her picture books. I took her
few spare clothes out of the wardrobe, her two good
robes and her spare trousers. One had a sense that
they had been hanging there for a few hours only
and didn’t belong, they were in passage like a
butterfly in a room. In a drawer I found her small
triangular pants and her collection of scarves. There
was really very little to put in the box, less than a
week-end visitor’s at home.

In the sitting-room there was a photograph of
herself and Pyle. They had been photographed in
the botanical gardens beside a large stone dragon.
She held Pyle’s dog on a leash— a black chow with a

27

black tongue. A too black dog. I put the photo-
graph in her box. “What’s happened to the dog?"
I said.

“It isn’t here. He may have taken it with him.”

“Perhaps it will return and you can analyse the
earth on its paws.”

“I’m not Lecoq, or even Maigret, and there’s a
war on.”

I went across to the bookcase and examined the
two rows of bqoks — Pyle’s library. The Advance of Red
China, The Challenge to Democracy, The Rdle of the West
— these, I suppose, were the complete works of York
Harding. There were a lot of Congressional Reports,
a Vietnamese phrase book, a history of the War
in t the Philippines, a Modern Library Shakespeare.
On what did he relax? I found his light reading on
another shelf: a portable Thomas Wolfe and a
mysterious anthology called The Triumph of Life, and
a selection of American poetry. There was also a
book of chess problems. It didn’t seem much for the
end of the working day, but, after all, he had had
Phuong. Tucked away behind the anthology^ there
was a paper-backed book called The Physiology of
Marriage. Perhaps he was studying sex, as he had
studied the East, on paper. And the keyword was
marriage. Pyle believed in being involved.

His desk was quite bare. “You’ve made a clean
sweep,” I said.

“Oh,” Vigot said, “I had to take charge of these
on behalf of the American Legation. You know how
quickly rumour spreads. There might have been
looting. I had all his papers sealed up.” He said it
seriously without even smiling.

• 28

“Anything damaging?”

“We can’t afford to find anything damaging
against an ally,” Vigot said.

“Would you mind if I took one of these books —
as a keepsake?”

‘U’ll look the other way.”

I chose York Harding’s The R6le of the West and
packed it in the box with Phuong’s clothes.

“As a friend,” Vigot said, “is there nothing you
could tell me in confidence? My report’s all tied up.
He was murdered by the Communists. Perhaps the
beginning of a campaign against American aid. But
between you and me — listen, it’s dry talking, what
about a vermouth cassis round the corner?”

“Too early.”

“He didn’t confide anything to you the last time
he saw you?”

“No.”

“When was that?”

“Yesterday morning. After the big bang.”

He paused to let my reply sink in — to my mind,
not to* his: he interrogated fairly. “You were out
when he called on you last night?”

“Last night? I must have been. I didn’t
think . . .”

“You may be wanting an exit visa. You know we
could delay it indefinitely.”

“Do you really believe,” I said, “that 1 want to go
horn??”

Vigot looked through the window at the bright
cloudless day. He said sadly, “Most people do.”

“I like it here. At home there are — problems.”

“Mcrde,” Vigot said, “here’s the American

29

Economic Attach^.” He repeated with sarcasm,
“Economic Attach^.”

“I’d better be off. He’ll want to seal me up too.”

Vigot said wearily, “I wish you luck. He’ll have a
terrible lot to say to me.”

The Economic Attache was standing is

Packard when I came out, trying to explain some-
thing to his driver. He was a stout middle-aged
man with an exaggerated bottom and a face that
looked as if i$ had never needed a razor. He called
out, “Fowler. Could you explain to this darned
driver . . .?”

I explained.

He said, “But that’s just what I told him, but he
always pretends not to understand French.”

“It may be a matter of accent.”

“I was three years in Paris. My accent’s good
enough for one of these darned Vietnamese.”

“The voice of Democracy,” 1 said.

“What’s that?”

“I expect it’s a book by York Harding.”

“I don’t get you.” He took a suspicious look at the
box I carried. “What’ve you got there?” he said.

“Two pairs of white silk trousers, two silk robes,
some girl’s underpants — three pairs, I think. All
home products. No American aid.”

“Have you been up there?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You heard the news?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” he said, “terrible.”

“I expect the Minister’s very disturbed.”

“I should say. He’s with the High Commissioner

30

now, and he’s asked for an interview with the
President.” He put his hand on my arm and walked
me away from the cars. “You knew young Pyle well,
didn’t you? I can’t get over a thing like that
happening to him. I knew his father. Professor
H^add C. Pyle — you’ll have heard of him?”

^No.”

“He’s the world authority on under-water erosion.
Didn’t you see his picture on the cover of Time the
other month?”

“Oh, I think I remember. A crumbling cliff in
the background and gold-rimmed glasses in the
foreground.”

“That’s him. I had to draft the cable home. It
was terrible. I loved that boy like he was my son.”

“That makes you closely related to his father.”

He turned his wet brown eyes on me. He said,
“What’s getting you? That’s not the way to talk
when a fine young fellow . . .”

“I’m sorry,” t 1 said. “Death takes people in
different ways.” Perhaps he had really loved Pyle.
“What'did you say in your cable?” I asked.

He replied seriously and literally, “ ‘Grieved to
report your son died soldier’s death in cause of
Democracy.’ The Minister signed it.”

“A soldier’s death,” I said. “Mightn’t that prove
a bit confusing? I mean to the folks at home. The
Economic Aid Mission doesn’t sound like the Army.
Do y«u get Purple Hearts?”

He said in a low voice, tense with ambiguity, “He
had special duties.”

“Oh yes, we all guessed that.”

“He didn’t talk, did he?”

3 *

“Oh no,” I said, and Vigot’s phrase came, back
to me, ‘He was a very quiet American.’ ”

“Have you any hunch,” he asked, “why they
killed him? and who?”

Suddenly I was angry; I was tired of the whole
pack of them with their private stores of Goca^fipla
and their portable hospitals and their Wydecar^and
their not quite latest guns. I said, “Yes. They
killed him because he was too innocent to live. He
was young and ignorant and silly and he got
involved. He had no more of a notion than any of
you what the whole affair’s about, and you gave
him money and York Harding’s books on the East
and said, ‘Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.’
He never saw anything he hadn’t heard in a lecture
hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of
him. When he saw a dead body he couldn’t even
see the wounds. A Red menace, a soldier of
democracy.”

“I thought you were his friend,” he said in a tone
of reproach.

“1 ivaS his friend. I’d have liked to see him reading
the Sunday supplements at home and following the
baseball. I’d have liked to see him safe with a
standardised American girl who subscribed to the
Book Club.”

He cleared his throat with embarrassment. “Of
course,” he said, “I’d forgotten that unfortunate
business. I was quite on your side, Fowlers He
behaved very badly. I don’t mind telling you I had
a long talk with him about the girl. You see, I had
the advantage of knowing Professor and Mrs.
Pyle. . . ‘ ,

32

I said, “Vigot’s waiting,” and walked away. For
the first time he spotted Phuong and when I looked
back at him he was watching me with pained
perplexity: an eternal elder brother who didn’t
understand.

CHAPTER III

(i)

The first time* Pyle met Phuong was again at the
Continental, perhaps two months after his arrival.
It was the early evening, in the momentary cool
which came when the sun had just gone down, and
the candles were lit on the stalls in the side streets.
The*' dice rattled on the tables where the French
were playing Quatrc Vingt-et-un and the girls in
the white silk trousers bicycled home jjown the rue
Catinat. Phuong was drinking a glass of orange
juice and I was having a beer and we sat in silence,
content to be together. Then Pyle came tentatively
across, and I introduced them. He had a way of
staring hard at a girl as though he hadn’t seen one
before and then blushing. “I was wondering
whether you and your lady,” Pyle said, “would step
across and join my table. One of our attaches . . .”

It was the Economic Attache. He beamed down
at us from the terrace above, a great warm wel-
coming smile, full of confidence, like the man who
keeps his friends because he uses the right deodorants.
I had heard him called Joe a number of times, but I
had never learnt his surname. He made a noisy
show of pulling out chairs and calling for the waiter,

34

though all that activity could possibly produce at the
Continental was a choice of beer, brandy-and-soda
or vermouth cassis. “Didn’t expect to see you here,
Fowler,” he said. “We are waiting for the boys
back from Hanoi. There seems to have been quite
a battle. Weren’t you with them?”

“I’m tired of flying four hours for a Press Con-
ference,” I said.

He looked at me with disapproval. He said,
“These guys are real keen. Why, I expect they
could earn twice as much in business or on the radio
without any risk.”

“They might have to work,” I said.

“They seem to sniff the battle like war horses,” he
went on exultantly, paying no attention to wor^s he
didn’t like. “Bill Granger — you can’t keep him out
of a scrap.”

“I expect you’re right. I saw him in one the
other evening at the bar of the Sporting.”

“You know very well I didn’t mean that.”

Two trishaw drivers came pedalling furiously
down the rue Catinat and drew up in a photo
finish outside the Continental. In the first was
Granger. The other contained a small, grey, silent
heap which Granger now began to pull out on to
the pavement. “Oh, come on, Mick,” he said,
“come on.” Then he began to argue with his driver
about the fare. “Here,” he said, “take it or leave it,”
anfl flung five times the correct amount into the
street for the man to stoop for.

The Economic Attache said nervously, “I guess
these boys deserve a little relaxation.”

Granger flung his burden on to a chair. Then he

35

noticed Phuong. “Why,” he said, “you old so-
and-so, Joe. Where did you find her? Didn’t know
you had a whistle in you. Sorry, got to find the can.
Look after Mick.”

“Rough soldierly manners,” I said.

Pyle said earnestly, blushing again, “I wouldn’t
have invited you two ot'er if I’d thought . . .”

The grey heap stirred in the chair and the head
fell on the table as though it wjisn’t attached. It
sighed, a long vyhistling sigh of infinite tedium, and
lay still.

“Do you know him?” I asked Pyle.

“No. Isn’t he one of the Press?”

“I heard Bill call him Mick.” the Economic
Attache said.

“Isn’t there a new U.P. correspondent?”

“It’s not him. T know him. What about your
Economic Mission? You can’t know aU your people
— there are hundreds of them.”

“I don’t think he belongs,” the Economic Attache
said. “I can’t recollect him.”

“Wc might find his identity card,” Pyle suggested.

“For God’s sake don’t wake him. One drunk’s
enough. Ailyway Granger will know.”

But he didn’t. He came gloomily back from the
lavatory. “Who’s the dame?” he asked morosely.

“Miss Phuong is a friend of Fowler’s,” Pyle said
stiffly. “We want to know who ...”

“Where’d he find her? You got to be careful’ in
this town.” He added gloomily, “Thank God for
penicillin.”

“Bill,” the Economic Attache said, “we want to
know who Mick is.”

36

“Search me.”

“But you brought him here.”

“The Frogs can’t take Scotch. He passed out.”

“Is he French? I thought you called him Mick.”

“Had to call him something,” Granger said. He
leant over to Phuong and said, “Here. You. Have
another glass of orange? Got a date tonight?”

I said, “She’s got a date every night.”

The Economic Attache said hurriedly, “How’s
the war, Bill?”

“Great victory north-west of Hanoi. French
recapture two villages they never told us they’d lost.
Heavy Victminh casualties. Haven’t been able to
count their own yet but will let us know in a week
or two.”

The Economic Attache said, “There’s a rumour
that the Victminh have broken into Phat Diem,
burned the Cathedral, chased out the Bishop.”

“They wouldn’t tell us about that in Hanoi.
That’s not a victory.”

“One of our medical teams couldn’t get beyond
Nam Dinh,” Pyle said.

“You didn’t get down as far as that. Bill?” the
Economic Attache asked.

“Who do you think I am? I’m a correspondent
with an Ordre de Circulation which shows w’hen I’m
out of bounds. I* fly to Hanoi airport. They give us
a car to the Press Camp. They lay on a flight over
th£ two towns they’ve recaptured and show us the
tricolour flying. It might be any darned flag at that
height. Then we have a Press Conference and a
colonel explains to us what we’ve been looking at.
Then we file our cables with the censor. Then we

37

have drinks. Best barman in Indo-China. Then we
catch the plane back.”

Pyle frowned at his beer.

“You underrate yourself, Bill,” the Economic
Attach^ said. “Why, that account of Road 66 —
what did you call it? Highway to Hell — that was
worthy of the Pulitzer. Y< ou know the story I mean —
the man with his head blown off kneeling in the ditch,
and that other you saw walking in a dream. . . .”

“Do you thipk I’d really go near their stinking
highway? Stephen Crane could describe a war
without seeing one. Why shouldn’t I? It’s only a
damned colonial war anyway. Get me another
drink. And then let’s go and find a girl. You’ve
got 3 bit of tail. I want a bit of tail too.”

I said to Pyle, “Do you think there’s anything in
the rumour about Phat Diem?”

“I don’t know. Is it important? I’dJike to go and
have a look,” he said, “if it’s important.”

“Important to the Economic Mission?”

“Oh, well,” he said, “you can’t draw hard lines.
Medicine’s a kind of weapon, isn’t it? These
Catholics, they’d be pretty strong against the
Communists, wouldn’t they?”

“They trade with the Communists. The Bishop
gets his cows and the bamboo for his building from
the Communists. I wouldn’t say they were exactly
York Harding’s Third Force,” I teased him.

“Break it up,” Granger was shouting. “Cdn’t
waste the whole night here. I’m off to the House of
Five Hundred Girls.”

“If you and Miss Phuong would have dinner with
me . . .” Pyle said.

38

“You can eat at the Chalet,” Granger inter-
rupted him, “while I’m knocking the girls next door.
Come on, Joe. Anyway you’re a man.”

I think it was then, wondering what is a man, that
I felt my first affection for Pyle. He sat a little
turned away from Granger, twisting his beer mug,
with an expression of determined remoteness. He
said to Phuong, “I guess you get tired of all this
shop— about your country, I mean?”

“Comment?”

“What are you going to do w5th Mick?” the
Economic Attache asked.

“Leave him here,” Granger said.

“You can’t do that. You don’t even know ins
name.”

“We could bring him along and let the 'girls look
after him.”

The Economic Attache gave a loud communal
laugh. He looked like a face on television. He said,
“You young people can do what you want, but I’m
too old for games. I’ll take him home with me. Did
you say he was French?”

“He spoke French.”

“If you can get him into my car . . .”

After he had diiven away, Pyle took a trishaw
with Granger, and Phuong and I followed along the
road to Cholon. Granger had made an attempt to
get into the trishaw with Fhuong, but Pyle diverted
him. As they pedalled us down the long suburban
road to the Chinese town a line of French armoured
cars went by, each with its jutting gun and silent
officer motionless like a figure-head under the stars
and the black, smooth, concave sky — trouble again

39

probably with a private army, the Binh Xuyen, who
ran the Grand Monde and the gambling halls of
Cholon. This was a land of rebellious barons. It was
like Europe in the Middle Ages. But what were the
Americans doing here? Columbus had not yet
discovered their country. I said to Phuong, “I like
that fellow, Pyle.”

“He’s quiet,” she said, and the adjective which she
was the first to use stuck like a schoolboy name, till
I heard even Vigot use it, sitting there with his green
eye-shade, telling me of Pyle’s death.

I stopped our trishaw outside the Chalet and said
to Phuong, “Go in and find a table. I had better
look after Pyle.” That was my first instinct — to
protect him. It never occurred to me that there was
greater need to protect myself. Innocence always
calls mutely for protection, when we would be so
much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence
is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering
the world meaning no harm.

When I reached the House of the Five Hundred
Girls, Pyle and Granger had gone inside. I asked at
the military' police post just inside the doorway,
“Deux Americains?”

He was a young Foreign Legion corporal. He
stopped cleaning his revolver and jutted his thumb
towards the doorway beyond, making a joke in
German. I couldn’t understand it.

It was the hour of rest in the immense courtyard
which lay open to the sky\ Hundreds of girls lay on
the grass or sat on their heels talking to their com-
panions. The curtains were undrawn in the little
cubicles around the square — one tired girl lay alone

40

on a bed with her ankles crossed. There was trouble
in Cliolon and the troops were confined to quarters
and there was no work to be done: the Sunday of
the body. Only a knot of fighting, scrabbling,
shouting girls showed me where custom was still
alive. I remembered the old Saigon story of the
distinguished visitor who had lost his trousers
fighting his way back to the safety of the police post.
There was no protection here for the civilian. If he
chose to poach on military territory, he must look
after himself and find Ills own way ofit.

I had learnt a technique — t® divide and conquer.
I chose one in the crowd that gathered round me
and edged her slowly towards the spot where Pyle
and Granger struggled.

“Jc suis un vieux,” I said. “Trop fatigue.”* She
giggled and pressed. “Mon ami,” I said, “il est
tres riche, tres vigoureux.”

“Tu es sale,” she said.

I caught sight of Granger flushed and triumphant;
it was as though he took this demonstration as a
tribute to his manhood. One girl had her arm
through Pyle’s and was trying to tug him gently out
of the ring. I pushed my girl in among them and
called to him, “Pyle, over here.”

He looked at me over their heads and said, “It’s
terrible. Terrible.” It may have been a trick of the
lamplight, but his face ioo3*(Sd haggard. It occurred
to *ne that he was quite possibly a virgin.

“Corne along, Pyle,” I sSlid. “Leave them to
Granger.” I saw his hand move towards his hip
pocket. I really believed he intended to empty his
pockets of piastres and greenbacks. “Don’t be a

4 *

fool, Pyle,” I called sharply. “You’ll have them
fighting.” My girl was turning back to me and I
gave her another push into the inner ring round
Granger. “Non, non,” I said, “je suis un Anglais,
pauvre, tres pauvre.” Then I got hold of Pyle’s
sleeve and dragged him out, with the girl hanging
on to his other arm like a hooked fish. Two or three
girls tried to intercept us before we got to the gatew ay
where the corporal stood watching, but they were
half-hearted.

“What’ll I do with this one?” Pyle said.

“She won’t be any trouble,” and at that moment
she let go his arm and dived back into the scrimmage
round Granger.

“Will he be all right?” Pyle asked anxiously.

“He’s got what he wanted — a bit of tail.”

The night outside seemed very quiet with only
another squadron of armoured cars thriving by like
people with a purpose. He said, “It’s terrible. I
wouldn’t have believed. . . .” He said with sad awe,
“They were so pretty.” He was not envying
Granger, fee was complaining that anything good —
and prettiness and grace are surely forms of good-
ness — should be marred or ill-treated. Pyle could
see pain when it was in front of his eyes. (I don’t
write that as a sneer; after all there are many of us
who can’t.)

I said, “Come back to the Chalet. Phuong’s
waiting.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I quite forgot. You
shouldn’t have left her.”

“She wasn’t in danger.”

“I just thought I’d see Granger safely ” He

42

dropped again into his thoughts, but as we entered
the Chalet he said with obscure distress, “I’d for-
gotten how many men there are. . .

( 2 )

Phuong had kept us a table at the edge of the
dance-floor and the orchestra was playing some tune
which had been popular in Paris five years ago.
Two Vietnamese couples were dancing, small, neat,
aloof, with an air of civilisation we couldn’t match.
(I recognised one, an accountant from the Banque
de l’Indo-Chine and his wife.) They never, one felt,
dressed carelessly, said the wrong word, were a prey
to untidy passion. If the war seemed medieval,
they were like the eighteenth-century future. One
would have expected Mr. Pham-Van-Tu to write
Augustans in his spare time, but I happened to
know he was a student of Wordsworth and wrote
nature poems. His holidays he spent at Dalat, the
nearest he could get to the atmosphere of the English
lakes. He bowed slightly as he came round. I
wondered how Granger had fared fifty yards up
the road.

Pyle was apologising to Phuong in bad French
for having kept her waiting. “C’est impardonable,”
he said.

“Where have you been?” she asked him.

He said, “I was seeing Granger home.”

“Home?” I said and laughed, and Pyle looked at
me as though I were another Granger. Suddenly I
saw myself as he saw me, a man of middle-age, with
eyes a little bloodshot, beginning to put on weight,

43

ungraceful in love, less noisy than Granger perhaps
but more cynical, less innocent, and I saw Phuong
for a moment as I had seen her first, dancing past
my table at the Grand Monde in a white ball-dress,
eighteen years old, watched by an elder sister who
had been determined on a good European marriage.
An American had bought a ticket and asked her for
a dance: he was a little drunk — not harmfully, and
I suppose he was new to the country and thought
the hostesses of the Grand Monde were whores. He
held her much too close as they went round the floor
the first time, and then suddenly there she was,
going back to sit with her sister, and he was left,
stranded and lost among the dancers, not knowing
what had happened or why. And the girl whose
name I didn’t know sat quietly there, occasionally
sipping her orange juice, owning herself completely.

“Peut-on avoir l’honnrur?” Pyle, was saying in his
terrible accent, and a moment later I saw them
dancing in silence at the other end of the room,
Pyle holding her so far away from him that you
expected him at any moment to sever contact. He
was a very bad dancer, and she had been the best
dancer I had ever knowm in her days at the Grand
Monde.

It had been a long and frustrating courtship. If 1
could have offered marriage and a settlement every-
thing would have been easy, and the elder sister
would have slipped quietly and tactfully af/ay
whenever we were together. But three months
passed before I saw her so much as momentarily
alone, on a balcony at the Majestic, while her sister
in the next room kept on asking when we proposed

44

to come in. A cargo boat from France was being
unloaded in Saigon River by the light of flares, the
trishaw bells rang like telephones, and I might have
been a young and inexperienced fool for all I found
to say. I went back hopelessly to my bed in the rue
Catinat and never dreamed that four months later
she would be lying beside me, a little out of breath,
laughing as though with surprise because nothing
had been quite what she expected.

“Monsieur Foulair." I had been p atching them
dance and hadn’t seen her sister signalling to me
from another table. Now she came over and I
reluctantly asked her to sit down. We had never
been friends since the night she was taken ill in the
Grand Monde and I had seen Pliuong home.

“I haven’t seen you for a whole year,” she said.

“I am away so often at Hanoi.”

“Who is your friend?” she asked.

“A man called Pyle.”

“What docs he do?*'

“lie belongs to the American Economic Mission.
You know the kind of thing— electrical sewing
machines for starving seamstresses.”

“Are there any?”

“I don’t know.”

"Rut they don’t use sewing machines. There
wouldn’t be any electricity where they live.” She
was a very literal woman.

‘•You’ll* have to ask Pyle,” 1 said.

“Is he married?”

I looked at the dance floor. “I should say that’s
as near as he ever got to a woman.”

“He dances very badly,” she said.

45

“Yes.”

“But he looks a nice reliable man.”

“Yes.”

“Can I sit with you for a little? My friends are
very dull.”

The music stopped and Pyle bowed stiffly to
Phuong, then led her back and drew out her chair.
I could tell that his formality pleased her. I thought
how much she missed in her relation to me.

“This is Phyong’s sister,” I said to Pyle. “Miss
Hei.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said and
blushed.

“You come from New York?” she asked.

“Jsfo. From Boston.”

“That is in the United States too?”

“Oh yes. Yes.”

“Is your father a business man?”

“Not really. He’s a professor.”

“A teacher?” she asked with a faint note of dis-
appointment.

“Well, he’s a kind of authority, you know. People
consult him.”

“About health? Is he a doctor?”

“Not that sort of doctor. He’s a doctor of engineer-
ing though. He understands all about underwater
erosion. You know what that is?”

“ No.”

Pyle said with a dim attempt at humour, “Well,
I’ll leave it to Dad to tell you about that.”

“He is here?”

“Oh no.”

“But he is coming?”

46

“No. That was just a joke,” Pyle said apolo-
getically.

“Have you got another sister?” I asked Miss Hei.

“No. Why?”

“It sounds as though you were examining Mr.
Pyle’s marriageability.”

“I have only one sister,” Miss Hei said, and she
clamped her hand heavily down on Phuong’s knee,
like a chairman with his gavel marking a point of
order.

“She’s a very pretty sister,” Pyle said.

“She is the most beautiful girl in Saigon,” Miss
Hei said, as though she were correcting him.

“I can believe it.”

1 said, “It’s time we ordered dinner. Even the
most beautiful girl in Saigon must eat.”

“I am not hungry,” Phuong said.

“She is delicate,” Miss Hei went firmly on. There
was a note of menace in her voice. “She needs care.
She deserves care. She is very, very loyal.”

“My friend is a lucky man,” Pyle said gravely.

“She loves children,” Miss Hei said.

I laughed and then caught Pyle’s eye: he was
looking at me with shocked surprise, and suddenly it
occurred to me tha.. he was genuinely interested in
what Miss Hei had to say. While I was ordering
dinner (though Phuong hrd told me she was not
hungry, I knew she could manage a good steak
tart^re with two raw eggs and etceteras), I listened
to him seriously discussing the question of children.
“I’ve always thought I’d like a lot of children,” he
said. “A big family’s a wonderful interest. It makes
for the stability of marriage. And it’s good for the

47

children too. I was an only child. It’s a great
disadvantage being an only child.” I had never
heard him talk so much before.

“How old is your father?” Miss Hei asked with
gluttony.

“Sixty-nine.”

“Old people love grandchildren. It is very sad
that my sister has no parents to rejoice in her
children. When the day comes,” she added with a
baleful look at me.

“Nor you either,” Pyle said, rather unnecessarily
I thought.

“Our father was of a very good family. He was a
mandarin in Hue.”

I said, “I’ve ordered dinner for all of you.”

“Not for me,” Miss Hei said. “I must be going to
my friends. I would like to meet Mr. Pyle again.
Perhaps you could manage that.”

“When I get back from the north,” I said.

“Are you going to the north?”

“1 think it’s time I had a look at the war.”

“But the Press are all back,” Pyle said.

“That’s the best time for me. I don’t have to meet
Granger.”

“Then you must come and have dinner with
me and my sister when Monsieur Foulair is gone.”
She added with morose courtesy, “To cheer her

“P-”

After she had gone Pyle said, “What a charming,
cultivated woman. And she spoke English so well.”

“Tell him my sister was in business once in
Singapore,” Phuong said proudly.

“Really? What kind of business?”

, 48

I translated for her. “Import, export. She can do
shorthand.”

“I wish we had more like her in the Economic
Mission.”

“I will speak to her,” Phuong said. “She would
like to work for the Americans.”

After dinner they danced again. I am a bad
dancer too and I hadn’t the unself-consciousness of
Pyle — or had I possessed it, I wondered, in the days
when I was first in love with Phuong? There must
have been many occasions at the Grand Monde
before the memorable night of Miss Hei’s illness
when I had danced with Phuong just for an oppor-
tunity to speak to her. Pyle was taking no such
opportunity as they came round the floor again; he
had relaxed a little, that was all, and w&s holding
her less at arm’s length, but they were both silent.
Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise
and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again. I
could hardly believe that in an hour, two hours,
she would be coming back with me to that dingy
room with the communal closet and the old women
squatting on the landing.

I wished I had never heard the rumour about
Phat Diem, or tliat the rumour had dealt with
any other town than the one place in the north
where my friendship witn a French naval officer
would allow me to slip in, uncensored, uncontrolled.
Amewspaper scoop? Not in those days when all the
world wanted to read about was Korea. A chance
of death? Why should I want to die when Phuong
slept beside me every night? But I knew the answer
to that question. From childhood I had never

49

believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it.
Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This
month, next year, Phuong would leave me. If not
next year, in three years. Death was the only
absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would
lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could
believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they
were keeping their courage up with a fable of the
changeless and the permanent. Death was far more
certain than God, and with death there would be
no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The
nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference
would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To
kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable
benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved
their enemies. It was their friends they preserved
for pain and vacuity.

“Forgive me for taking Miss Phuong* from you,”
Pyle’s voice said.

“Oh, I’m no dancer, but I like watching her
dance.” One always spoke of her like that in the
third person as though she were not there. Some-
times she seemed invisible like peace.

The first cabaret of the evening began: a singer, a
juggler, a comedian — he was very obscene, but when
I looked at Pyle he obviously couldn’t follow the
argot. He smiled when Phuong smiled and laughed
uneasily when I laughed. “I wonder where Granger
is now,” I said, and Pyle looked at me reproachful*/.

Then came the turn of the evening: a troupe of
female impersonators. I had seen many of them
during the day in the rue Catinat walking up and
down, in old slacks and sweaters, a bit blue about the

50

chin, swaying their hips. Now in low-cut evening
dresses, with false jewellery and false breasts and
husky voices, they appeared at least as desirable as
most of the European women in Saigon. A group of
young Air Force officers whistled to them and they
smiled glamorously back. I was astonished by the
sudden violence of Pyle’s protest. “Fowler,” he said,
“let’s go. Wc’vc had enough, haven’t we? This isn’t
a bit suitable for her.”

CHAPTER IV

(*)

From the bell tower of the Cathedral the battle
was only picturesque, fixed like a panorama of the
Boer War in an old Illustrated London News. An
aeroplane was parachuting supplies to an isolated
post in the calcaire, those strange weather-eroded
mountains on the Annam border that look like piles
of pumice, and because it always returned to the
same place for its glide, it might never have moved,
and the parachute was always there in the same spot,
half-way to earth. From the plain the mortar-bursts
rose unchangingly, the smoke as solid as stone, and
in the market the flames burnt palely in the sunlight.
The tiny figures of the parachutists moved in single
file along the canals, but at this height they appeared
stationary. Even the priest who sat in a corner of
the tower never changed his position as he read in
his breviary. The war was very tidy and clean at
that distance.

I had come in before dawn in a landing-craft from
Nam Dinh. We couldn’t land at the naval statibn
because it was cut off by the enemy, who completely
surrounded the town at a range of six hundred
yards, so the boat ran in beside the flaming market.
We were an easy target in the light of the flames,

52

but for some reason no one fired- Everything was
quiet, except for the flop and crackle of the burning
stalls. I could hear a Senegalese sentry on the river’s
edge shift his stance.

I had known Phat Diem well in the days before
the attack — the one long narrow street of wooden
stalls, cut up every hundred yards by a canal, a
church and a bridge. At night it had been lit only
by candles or small oil lamps (there was no elec-
tricity in Phat Diem except in theJFrench officers’
quarters), and day or night the street was packed
and noisy. In its strange medieval way, under the
shadow and protection of the Prince Bishop, it has
been the most living town in all the country, and
now when I landed and walked up to the officers’
quarters it was the most dead. Rubble and broken
glass and the smell of burnt paint and plaster, the
long street empty as far as the sight could reach, it
reminded me of a London thoroughfare in the early
morning after an all-clear: one expected to see a
placard, “Unexploded Bomb.”

The front wall of the officers’ house had been
blown out, and the houses across the street were in
ruins. Coming do.vn the river from Nam Dinh I
had learnt from Lieutenant Peraud what had
happened. He was a serious young man, a Free-
mason, and to him it was like a judgment on the
superstitions of his fellows. The Bishop of Phat Diem
had once visited Europe and acquired there a
devotion to Our Lady of Fatima — that vision of the
Virgin which appeared, so Roman Catholics believe,
to a group of children in Portugal. When he came
home, he built a grotto in her honour in the

53

Cathedral precincts, and he celebrated her feast
day every year with a procession. Relations with
the colonel in charge of the French and Vietnamese
troops had always been strained since the day when
the authorities had disbanded the Bishop’s private
army. This year the colonel — who had some sym-
pathy with the Bishop* for to each of them his
country was more important than Catholicism —
made a gesture of amity and walked with his senior
officers in the £ront of the procession. Never had a
greater crowd gathered in Phat Diem to do honour
to Our Lady of Fatima. Even many of the Buddhists
— who formed about half the population — could not
bear to miss the fun, and those who had belief in
neither God believed that somehow all these banners
and incense-burners and the golden monstrance
would keep war from their homes. All that was left
of the Bishop’s army — his brass band — led the
procession, and the French officers, pious by order
of the colonel, followed like choirboys through the
gateway into the Cathedral precincts, past the white
statue of the Sacred Heart that stood on an island
in the little lake before the Cathedral, under the
bell tower with spreading oriental wings and into
the carved wooden cathedral with its gigantic
pillars formed out of single trees and the scarlet
lacquer work of the altar, more Buddhist than
Christian. From all the villages between the canals,
from that Low Country landscape where yotmg
green rice-shoots and golden harvests take the place
of tulips and churches of windmills, the people
poured in.

Nobody noticed the Vietminh agents who had

54

joined the procession too, and that night as the
main Communist battalion moved through the
passes in the calcaire, into the Tonkin plain, watched
helplessly by the French outpost in the mountains
above, the advance agents struck in Phat Diem.

Now after four days, with the help of parachutists,
the enemy had been pushed back half a mile around
the town. This was a defeat: no journalists were
allowed, no cables could be sent, for the papers
must carry only victories. The authorities would
have stopped me in Hanoi if they ha9 known of my
purpose, but the further you get from headquarters,
the looser becomes the control until, when you come
within range of the enemy’s fire, you are a welcome
guest — what has been a menace for the Etat Major
in Hanoi, a worry for the full colonel in Naha Dfnh,
to the lieutenant in the field is a joke, a distraction,
a mark of interest from the outer world, so that for a
few blessed hours he can dramatise himself a little
and see in a false heroic light even his own wounded
and dead.

The priest shut his breviary and said, “Well, that’s
finished.” He was a European, but not a French-
man, for the Bishop would not have tolerated a
French priest in his diocese. He said apologetically,
“I have to come up here, you understand, for a bit
of quiet from all those poor people.” The sound of
the mortar-fire seemed to be closing in, or perhaps
it was the enemy at last replying. The strange
difficulty was to find them: there were a dozen
narrow fronts, and between the canals, among the
farm buildings and the paddy fields, innumerable
opportunities for ambush.

55

Immediately below us stood, sat and lay the whole
population of Phat Diem. Catholics, Buddhists,
pagans, they had all packed their most valued
possessions — a cooking-stove, a lamp, a mirror, a
wardrobe, some mats, a holy picture — and moved
into the Cathedral precincts. Here in the north it
w'ould be bitterly cold when darkness came, and
already the Cathedral was full: there was no mon-
shelter; even on the stairs to the bell-tower every step
was occupied, and all the time more people crowded
through the gates, carrying their babies and house-
hold goods. They believed, whatever their religion,
that here they would be safe. While we watched, a
young man with a rifle in Vietnamese uniform pushed
his way through: he was stopped by a priest, who
took his rifle from him. The father at my side said
in explanation, “We are neutral here. This is God’s
territory.” I thought, ‘It’s a strange pqor population
God has in his kingdom, frightened, cold, starving
(“I don’t know how we are going to feed these
people,” tjae priest told me): you’d think a great
King would do better than that.’ But then I thought,
‘It’s always the same wherever one goes — it’s not the
most powerful rulers who have the happiest popula-
tions.’

Little shops had already been set up below. 1
said, “It’s like an enormous fair, isn’t it, but without
one smiling face.”

The priest said, “They were terribly cold* last
night. We have to keep the monastery gates shut or
they would swamp us.”

“You all keep warm in there?” I asked.

“Not very warm. And we would not have room

56

for a tenth of them.” He went on, “I know what you
are thinking. But it is essential for some of us to
keep well. We have the only hospital in Phat Diem,
and our only nurses are these nuns.”

“And your surgeon?”

“I do what I can.” I saw then that his soutane
was speckled with blood.

He said, “Did you come up here to find me?”

“No. I wanted to get my bearings.”

“I asked you because I had a man up here last
night. He wanted to go to confession? He had got a
little frightened, you see, with what he had seen along
the canal. One couldn’t blame him.”

“It’s bad along there?”

“The parachutists caught them in a cross-fire.
Poor souls, I thought perhaps you were fdtling*the
same.”

“I’m not a Roman Catholic. I don’t think you
could even call me a Christian.”

“It’s strange what fear does to a man.”

“It would never do that to me. If I believed in
any God at all, I should still hate the idea of con-
fession. Kneeling in one of your boxes. Exposing
myself to another man. You must excuse me,
Father, but to me it seems morbid — unmanly
even.”

“Oh,” he said lightly, “1 expect you are a good
man. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had much to
regwet.”

I looked along the churches, where they ran down
evenly spaced between the canals, towards the sea.
A light flashed from the second tower. I said, “You
haven’t kept all your churches neutral.”

57

C

“It isn’t possible,” he said. “The French have
agreed to leave the Cathedral precincts alone. We
can’t expect more. That’s a Foreign Legion post
you are looking at.”

“I’ll be going along. Goodbye, Father.”

“Goodbye and good luck. Be careful of snipers.”

I had to push my way through the crowd to get
out, past the lake and the white statue with its
sugary outspread arms, into the long street. I could
see for nearly three quarters of a mile each way, and
there were only two living beings in all that length
besides myself— two soldiers with camouflaged Hel-
mets going slowly away up the edge of the street,
their sten guns at the ready. I say the living because
one body lay in a doorway with its head in the road.
The buzz of flies collecting there and the squelch, of
the soldiers’ boots growing fainter and fainter were
the only sounds. I walked quickly past the body,
turning my head the other way. A few minutes
later when I looked back I was quite alone with my
shadow and there were no sounds except the sounds
I made. I felt as though I were a mark on a firing
range. It occurred to me that if something happened
to me in this street it might be many hours before I
was picked up: time for the flies to collect.

When I had crossed two canals, I took a turning
that led to a church. A dozen men sat on the
ground in the camouflage of parachutists, while two
officers examined a map. Nobody paid me-»any
attention when I joined them. One man, who wore
the long antenna: of a walkie-talkie, said, “We can
move now,” and everybody stood up.

I asked them in my bad French whether I could

58

accompany them. An advantage of this war was that
a European face was in itself a passport on the field:
a European could not be suspected of being an
enemy agent. “Who are you?” the lieutenant
asked.

“I am writing about the war,” I said.

“American?”

“No, English.”

He said, “It is a very small affair, but if you wish
to come with us. . . .” He began to take off his steel
helmet. “No, no,” I said, “that is for combatants.”

“As you wish.”

We went out behind the church in single file, the
lieutenant leading, and halted for a moment on a
canal-bank for the soldier with the walkie-talkie to
get contact with the patrols on either flank, 'rtie
mortar shells tore over us and burst out of sight. We
had picked up more men behind the church and were
now about thirty strong. The lieutenant explained
to me in a low voice, stabbing a finger at his map,
“Three hundred have been reported in this village
here. Perhaps massing for tonight. We don’t know.
No one has found them yet.”

“How far?”

“Three hundred yards.”

Words came over the wireless and we went on in
silence, to the right the straight canal, to the left
low scrub and fields and scrub again. “AH clear,”
the lieutenant whispered with a reassuring wave as
we started. Forty yards on, another canal, with what
was left of a bridge, a single plank without rails, ran
across our front. The lieutenant motioned to us to
deploy and we squatted down facing the unknown

59

territory ahead, thirty feet off, across the plank.
The men looked at the water and then, as though
by a word of command, all together, they looked
away. For a moment I didn’t see what they had
seen, but when I saw, my mind went back, I don’t
know why, to the Chalet and the female imper-
sonators and the young soldiers whistling and Pyle
saying, “This isn’t a bit suitable.”

The canal was full of bodies: I am reminded now
of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The
bodies overlapped: one head, seal-grey, and anony-
mous as a conv ict with a shaven scalp, stuck up out
of the water like a buoy. There was no blood: I
suppose it had flowed away a long time ago. I have
no idea how many there were: they must have been
caught in a cross-fire, trying to get back, and i
suppose every man of us along the bank was thinking,
‘Two can play at that game.’ I too*took my eyes
away; w'e didn’t want to be reminded of how little
we counted, how quickly, simply and anonymous!)
death came. Even though my reason wanted the
state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act.
I would have liked death to come with due warning,
so that I could prepare myself. For what? 1 didn't
know, nor how, except by taking a look around at
the little I would be leaving.

The lieutenant sat beside the man with the walkie-
talkie and stared at the ground between his feet.
The instrument began to crackle instructions and
with a sigh as though he had been roused from sleep
he got up. There was an odd comradeliness about
all their movements, as though they were equals
engaged on a task they had performed together

60

times out of mind. Nobody waited to be told what
to do. Two men made for the plank and tried to
cross it, but they were unbalanced by the weight of
their arms and had to sit astride and work their way
across a few inches at a time. Another man had
found a punt hidden in some bushes down the canal
and he worked it to where the lieutenant stood. Six
of us got in and he began to pole it towards the
other bank, but we ran on a shoal of bodies and
stuck. He pushed away with his pole, sinking it into
this human clay, and one body was released and
floated up all its length beside the boat like a bather
lying in the sun. Then we were free again, and
once on the other side we scrambled out, with no
backward look. No shots had been fired: we were
alive: death had withdrawn perhaps as far as tlie
next canal. I heard somebody just behind me say
with great seriousness, “Gott sei dank.” Except for
the lieutenant they were most of them Germans.

Beyond was a group of farm buildings: the
lieutenant went in first, hugging the wall, and we
followed at six foot intervals in single file. Then the
men, again without an order, scattered through the
farm. Life had deserted it — not so much as a hen
had been left behind, though hanging on the walls
of what had been the living-room were two hideous
oleographs of the Sacred Heart and the Mother and
Child which gave the whole ramshackle group of
buildings a European air. One knew what these
people believed even if one didn’t share their belief:
they were human beings, not just grey drained
cadavers.

So much of war is sitting around and doing

61

nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no
guarantee of the amount of time you have left it
doesn’t seem worth starting even a train of thought.
Doing what they had done so often before, the
sentries moved out. Anything that stirred ahead of
us now was enemy. The lieutenant marked his
map and reported our position over the radio. A
noonday hush fell: even the mortars were quiet and
the air was empty of planes. One man doodled with
a twig in. the dirt of the farmyard. After a while it
was as if we had been forgotten by war. I hoped
that Phuong had sent my suits to the cleaners. A
cold wind ruffled the straw of the yard, and a man
went modestly behind a barn to relieve himself. I
tried to remember whether I had paid the British
Consul in Hanoi for the bottle of whisky he had
allowed me.

Two shots were fired to our front, and I thought,
‘This is it. Now it comes.’ It was all the warning I
wanted. I awaited, with a sense of exhilaration, the
permanent thing.

But nothing happened. Once again I had “over-
prepared the event.” Only long minutes afterwards
one of the sentries entered and reported something
to the lieutenant. I caught the phrase, “Deux
civils.”

The lieutenant said to me, “We will go and see,”
and following the sentry we picked our way along a
muddy overgrown path between two fields. Twenty
yards beyond the farm buildings, in a narrow ditch,
we came on what we sought: a woman and a small
boy. They were very clearly dead: a small neat clot
of blood on the woman’s forehead, and the child

62

might have been sleeping. He was about six years
old and he lay like an embryo in the womb with his
little bony knees drawn up. “Malchance,” the
lieutenant said. He bent down and turned the
child over. He was wearing a holy medal round his
neck, and I said to myself, ‘The juju doesn’t work.’
There was a gnawed piece of loaf under his body. I
thought, ‘I hate war.’

The lieutenant said, “Have you seen enough?”
speaking savagely, almost as though I had been
responsible for these deaths: perhaps to the soldier
the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who
includes the guilt of murder in the pay envelope and
escapes responsibility. We walked back to the farm
and sat down again in silence on the straw, out of the
wind, which like an animal seemed to know that
dark was coming. The man who had doodled was
relieving himself, and the man who had relieved
himself was doodling. I thought how in those
moments of quiet, after ihe sentries had been posted,
they must have believed it safe to move from the
ditch. I wondered whether they had lain there
long — the bread had been very dry. This farm was
probably their home.

The radio was working again. The lieutenant
said wearily, “They are going to bomb the village.
Patrols are called in for the night.” We rose and
began our journey back, punting again around the
shoal *of bodies, filing past the church. We hadn’t
gone very far, and yet it seemed a long enough
journey to have made with the killing of those two
as the only result. The planes had gone up, and
behind us the bombing began.

63

Dark had fallen by the time I reached the officers’
quarters, where I was spending the night. The
temperature was only a degree above zero, and the
sole warmth anywhere was in the blazing market.
With one wall destroyed by a bazooka and the doors
buckled, canvas curtains couldn’t shut out the
draughts. The electric dynamo was not working,
and we had to build barricades of boxes and books
to keep the candles burning. I played Quatre
Vingt-et-un for Communist currency with a Captain
Sorel: it wasn’t possible to play for drinks as I was
a guest of the mess. The luck went wearisomely back
and forth. I opened my bottle of whisky to try to
warm us a little, and the others gathered round.
The colonel said, “This is the first glass of whisky I
have had since I left Paris.”

A lieutenant came in from his round of the
sentries. “Perhaps we shall have a quiet night,” he
said.

“They will not attack before four,” the colonel
said. “Have you a gun?” he asked me.

“No.”

“I’ll find you one. Better keep it on your pillow.”
He added courteously, “I am afraid you will find
your mattress rather hard. And at three- thirty the
mortar-fire will begin. We try to break up any
concentrations.”

“How long do you suppose this will go on?”

“Who knows? We can’t spare any more hoops
from Nam Dinh. This is just a diversion. If we can
hold out with no more help than we got two days
ago, it is, one may say, a victory.”

The wind was up again, prowling for an entry.

' 64

The canvas curtain sagged (I was reminded of
Polonius stabbed behind the arras) and the candle
wavered. The shadows were theatrical. We might
have been a company of barnstormers.

“Have your posts held?”

“As far as wc know.” He said with an effect of
great tiredness, “This is nothing, you understand,
an affair of no importance compared with what is
happening a hundred kilometres away at Hoa Binh.
That is a battle.”

“Another glass, Colonel?”

“Thank you, no. It is wonderful, your English
whisky, but it is better to keep a little for the night
in case of need. I think, if you will excuse me, I will
get some sleep. One cannot sleep after the mortars
start. Captain Sorcl, you will see that Monsieur
Foulair has everything he needs, a candle, matches,
a revolver.” He went into his room.

It was the signal for all of us. They had put a
mattress on the floor for me in a small store-room and
1 was surrounded by wooden cases. I stayed awake
only a very short time — the hardness of the floors was
like rest. I wondered, but oddly without jealousy,
whether Phuong was at the flat. The possession of
a body tonight seemed a very small thing — perhaps
(hat day I had seen too many bodies which belonged
to no one, not even to themselves. We were all
expendable. When I fell asieep I dreamed of Pyle.
He *was dancing all by himself on a stage, stiffly,
with his arms held out to an invisible partner, and
I sat and watched him from a seat like a music-stool
with a gun in my hand in case anyone should inter-
fere with his dance. A programme set up by the

65

stage, like the numbers in an English music-hall, read,
“The Dance of Love. ‘A’ certificate.” Somebody
moved at the back of the theatre and I held my gun
tighter. Then I woke.

My hand was on the gun they had lent me, and a
man stood in the doorway with a candle in his hand.
He wore a steel helmet , which threw a shadow over
his eyes, and it was only when he spoke that I knew
he was Pyle. He said shyly, “I’m awfully sorry
to wake you up. They told me I could sleep in
here.”

I was still not fully awake. “Where did you get
that helmet?” I asked.

“Oh, somebody lent it to me,” he said vaguely. He
dragged in after him a military kitbag and began
to pull out a wool-lined sleeping-bag.

“You are very well equipped,” I said, trying to
recollect why either of us should be heue.

“This is the standard travelling kit,” he said, “of
our medical aid teams. They lent me one in Hanoi.”
He took out a thermos and a small spirit stove, a
hair-brush, a shaving-set and a tin of rations. I
looked at my watch. It was nearly three in the
morning.

( 2 )

Pyle continued to unpack. He made a little ledge
of cases, on which he put his shaving-mirror *arid
tackle. I said, “I doubt if you’ll get any water.”

“Oh,” he said, “I’ve enough in the thermos for the
morning.” He sat down on his sleeping bag and
began to pull off his boots.

66

“How on earth did you get here?” I asked.

“They let me through as far as Nam Dinh to see
our trachoma team, and then I hired a boat.”

“A boat?”

“Oh, some kind of a punt — I don’t know the name
for it. As a matter of fact I had to buy it. It didn’t
cost much.”

“And you came down the river by yourself?”

“It wasn’t really difficult, you know. The current
was with me.”

“You are crazy.”

“Oh no. The only real danger was running
aground.”

“Or being shot up by a naval patrol, or a French
plane. Or having your throat cut by the Vietminh.”

He laughed shyly. “Well, I’m here anyway,” he
said.

“Why?”

“Oh, there are two reasons. But I don’t want to
keep you awake.”

“I’m not sleepy. The guns will be starting soon.”

“Do you mind if I move the candle? It’s a bit
bright here.” He seemed nervous.

“What’s the first reason?”

“Well, the other day you made me think this place
was rather interesting. You remember when we
were with Granger . . . and Phuong.”

“Yes?”

' “P thought I ought to take a look at it. To tell you
the truth, I was a bit ashamed of Granger.”

“I see. As simple as all that.”

“Well, there wasn’t any real difficulty, was there?”
He began to play with his bootlaces, and there was

67

a long silence. “I’m not being quite honest,” he
said at last.

“No?”

“I really came to see you.”

“You came here to see me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He looked up from his bootlaces in an agony of
embarrassment. “I had to tell you — I’ve fallen in
love with Phuong.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. He was so unex-
pected and so serious. I said, “Couldn’t you have
waited till I got back? I shall be in Saigon next
week.”

“You might have been killed,” he said. “It
wouldn’t have been honourable. And then I don’t
know if I could have stayed away from Phuong all
that time.”.

“You mean, you have stayed away?”

“Of course. You don’t think I’ll tell her — without
you knowing?”

“People do,” I said. “When did it happen?”

“I guess it was that night at the Chalet, dancing
with her.”

“I didn’t think you ever got close enough.”

He looked at me in a puzzled way. If his conduct
seemed crazy to me, mine was obviously inexplicable
to him. He said, “You know, I think it was seeing
all those girls in that house. They were so prfctly.
Why, she might have been one of them. I wanted
to protect her.”

“I don’t think she’s in need of protection. Has
Miss Hei invited you out?”

68

“Yes, but I haven’t gone. I’ve kept away.” He
said gloomily, “It’s been terrible. I feel like such a
heel, but you do believe me, don’t you, that if you’d
been married — why, I wouldn’t ever come between
a man and his wife.”

“You seem pretty sure you can come between,” I
said. For the first time he had irritated me.

“Fowler,” he said, “I don’t know your Christian
name . . . ?”

“Thomas. Why?”

“I can call you Tom, can’t I? I feel in a way this
has brought us together. Loving the same woman,
I mean.”

“What’s your next move?”

He sat up enthusiastically against the packing-cases.
“Everything seems different now that you know,”
he said. “I shall ask her to marry me, Tom.”

“I’d rather you called me Thomas.” .

“She’ll just have to choose between us, Thomas.
That’s fair enough.” But was it fair? I felt for the
first time the premonitory chill of loneliness. It was
all fantastic, and yet, and yet . . . He might be a
poor lover, but I was the poor man. He had in his
hand the infinite riches of respectability.

He began to undress and I thought, ‘He has youth
too.’ How sad it was to envy Pyle.

I said, “I can’t marry hej. I have a wife at home.
She would never divorce me. She’s High Church —
if y»u know what that means.”

“I’m sorry, Thomas. By the way, my name’s
Alden, if you’d care ...”

“I’d rather stick to Pyle,” I said. “I think of you
as Pyle.”

69

He got into his sleeping bag and stretched his
hand out for the candle. “Whew,” he said, “I’m
glad that’s over, Thomas. I’ve been feeling awfully
bad about it.” It was only too evident that he no
longer did.

When the candle was out, I could just see the
outline of his crew-cut against the light of the flames
outside. “Good-night, Thomas. Sleep well,” and
immediately at those words like a bad comedy
cue the mortars opened up, whirring, shrieking,
exploding.

“Good God,” Pyle said, “is it an attack?”

“They are trying to stop an attack.”

“Well, I suppose, there’ll be no sleep for us now?”

“No sleep.”

“Thomas, I want you to know what I think of the
way you’ve taken all this — I think you’ve been swell,
swell, there’s no other word for it.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ve seen so much more of the world than I
have. You know, in some ways Boston is a bit —
cramping. Even if you aren’t a Lowell or a Cabot.
I wish you’d advise me, Thomas.”

“What about?”

“Phuong.”

“I wouldn’t trust my advice if I were you. I’m
biased. I want to keep her.”

“Oh, but I know you’re straight, absolutely
straight, and we both have her interests at heart?”

Suddenly I couldn’t bear his boyishness any more.
I said, “I don’t care that for her interests. You can
have her interests. I only want her body. I want
her in bed with me. I’d rather ruin her and sleep

70

with her than, than . . . look after her damned
interests.”

He said, “Oh,” in a weak voice, in the dark.

I went on, “If it’s only her interests you care
about, for God’s sake leave Phuong alone. Like any
other woman she’d rather have a good . . .” the
crash of a mortar saved Boston ears from the Anglo-
Saxon word.

But there was a quality of the implacable in Pyle.
He had determined I was behaving well and I had
to behave well. He said, “I know wliat you are
suffering, Thomas.”

“I’m not suffering.”

“Oh yes, you are. I know what I’d suffer if I
had to give up Phuong.”

“But I haven’t given her up.”

“I’m pretty physical too, Thomas, but I’d give
up all hope of that if I could see Phuong happy.”

“She is happy.”

“She can’t be — not in her situation. She needs
children.”

“Do you really believe all that nonsense her
sister . . .”

“A sister sometimes knows better . .

“She was just trying to sell the notion to you,
Pyle, because she thinks you have more money. And,
my God, she has sold it all r>ght.”

“I’ve only got my salary.’"

“Well, you’ve got a favourable rate of exchange
anyway.”

“Don’t be bitter, Thomas. These things happen.
I wish it had happened to anybody else but you.
Are those our mortars?”

71

“Yes, ‘our’ mortars. You talk as though she was
leaving me, Pyle.”

“Of course,” he said without conviction, “she may
choose to stay with you.”

“What would you do then?”

“I’d apply for a transfer.”

“Why don’t you just go away, Pyle, without
causing trouble?”

“It wouldn’t be fair to her, Thomas,” he said
quite seriously. I never knew a man who had better
motives for all* the trouble he caused. He added,
“I don’t think you quite understand Phuong.”

And waking that morning months later with
Phuong beside me, I thought, “And did you under-
stand her either? Could you have anticipated this
situation? Phuong so happily asleep beside me and
you dead?” Time has its revenges, but revenges
seem so often sour. Wouldn’t we all*do better not
trying to understand, accepting the fact that no
human being will ever understand another, not a
wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a
child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God —
a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if 1
wanted to be understood or to understand I would
bamboozle myself into belief, but 1 am a reporter;
God exists only for leader-writers.

“Are you sure there’s anything much to under-
stand?” I asked Pyle. “Oh, for God’s sake, let’s have
a whisky. It’s too noisy to argue.”

“It’s a bit early,” Pyle said.

“It’s damned late.”

I poured out two glasses and Pyle raised his and
stared through the whisky at the light of the candle.

72

His band shook whenever a shell burst, and yet he
had made that senseless trip from Nam Dinh.

Pyle said, “It’s a strange thing that neither of us
can say ‘Good luck’.” So we drank saying nothing.

73

CHAPTER V

(i)

I HAD THOUGHT I WOULD BE ONLY ONE WEEK AWAY

from Saigon, but it was nearly three weeks before 1
returned. In the first place it proved more difficult
to get out of the Phat Diem area than it had been to
get in. The road was cut between Nam Dinh and
Hanoi and aerial transport could not be spared for
one reporter who shouldn’t have been there anyway.
Then when I reached Hanoi the correspondents had
been flown up for briefing on the latest victory and
the plane that took them back had no seat left for
me. Pyle got away from Phat Diem the morning he
arrived: he had fulfilled his mission — to speak to me
about Phuong, and there was nothing to keep him.
I left him asleep when the mortar fire stopped at
five-thirty and when I returned from a cup of coffee
and some biscuits in the mess he wasn’t there. I
assumed that he had gone for a stroll — after punting
all the way down the river from Nam Dinh a few
snipers would not have worried him; he was as
incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as
he was incapable of conceiving the pain he might
cause others. On one occasion — but that was months
later — I lost control and thrust his foot into it, into
the pain I mean, and I remember how he turned

74

away and looked at his stained shoe in perplexity
and said, “I must get a shine before I see the
Minister.” I knew then he was already forming his
phrases in the style he had learnt from York Harding.
Yet he was sincere in his way: it was coincidence that
the sacrifices were all paid by others, until that final
night under the bridge to Dakow.

It was only when I returned to Saigon that I
learnt how Pyle, while I drank my coffee, had per-
suaded a young naval officer to take him on a
landing craft which after a routine patrol dropped
him surreptitiously at Nam Dinh. Luck was with
him and he got back to Hanoi with his trachoma
team twenty-four hours before the road was officially
regarded as cut. When I reached Hanoi he Jiad
already left for the south, leaving me a note'with the
barman at the Press Camp.

“Dear Thomas,” he wrote, “I can’t begin to tell
you how swell you were the other night. I can tell
you my heart was in my mouth when I walked into
that room to find you.” (Where had it been on the
long boat-ride down the river?) “There are not
many men who would have taken the whole thing
so calmly. You w're great, and I don’t feel half as
mean as I did, now that I’ve told you.” ( W as he the
only one that mattered? I wondered angrily, and
yet I knew that he didn’t intend it that way. To
him the whole affair would be happier as soon as he
didfi’t feel mean — I would be happier, Phuong
would be happier, the whole world would be happier,
even the Economic Attach^ and the Minister.
Spring had come to Indo-China now that Pyle was
mean no longer.) “I waited toe you here for twenty-

75

four hours, but I shan’t get back to Saigon for a
week if I don’t leave today, and my real work is in
the south. I’ve told the boys who are running the
trachoma teams to look you up — you’ll like them.
They are great boys and doing a man-size job.
Don’t worry in any way that I’m returning to Saigon
ahead of you. I promise you I won’t see Phuong
until you return. I don’t want you to feel later that
I’ve been unfair in any way. Cordially yours,
Alden.”

Again that calm assumption that “later” it would
be I who would lose Phuong. Is confidence based
on a rate of exchange? We used to speak of sterling
qualities. Have we got to talk now about a dollar
love? A dollar love, of course, would include
marriage and Junior and Mother’s Day, even
though later it might include Reno or the Virgin
Islands or wherever they go nowadays for their
divorces. A dollar love had good intentions, a clear
conscience, and to Hell with everybody. But my
love had no intentions: it knew the future. All one
could do was try to make the future less hard, to
break the future gently when it came, and even
opium had its value there. But I never foresaw that
the first future I would have to break to Phuong
would be the death of Pyle.

I went — for I had nothing better to do — to the
Press Conference. Granger, of course, was there. A
young and too beautiful French colonel presided.
He spoke in French and a junior officer translated.
The French correspondents sat together like a rival
football-team. I found it hard to keep my mind on
what the colonel was saying: all the time it wandered

76

back to Phuong and the one thought — suppose Pyle
is right and I lose her: where does one go from
here?

The interpreter said, “The colonel tells you that
the enemy has suffered a sharp defeat and severe
losses — the equivalent of one complete battalion.
The last detachments are now making their way
back across the Red River on improvised rafts.
They are shelled all the time by the Air Force.” The
colonel ran his hand through his elegant yellow hair
and, flourishing his pointer, danced his way down
the long maps on the wall. An American corre-
spondent asked, “What are the French losses?”

The colonel knew perfecdy well the meaning of
the question — it was usually put at about this $fage
of the conference, but he paused, pointer raised with
a kind smile like a popular schoolmaster, until it
was interpreted. Then he answered with patient
ambiguity.

“The colonel says our losses have not been heavy.
The exact number is not yet known.”

This was always the signal for trouble. You would
have thought that sooner or later the colonel would
have found a formula for dealing with his refractory
class, or that the headmaster would have appointed
a member of his staff more efficient at keeping order.

“Is the colonel seriously telling us,” Granger
said, “that he’s had time to count the enemy dead
and not his own?”

Patiently the colonel wove his web of evasion,
which he knew perfectly well would be destroyed
again by another question. The French corre-
spondents sat gloomily silent. If the American

77

correspondents stung the colonel into an admission
they would be quick to seize it, but they would not
join in baiting their countryman.

“The colonel says the enemy forces are being
over-run. It is possible to count the dead behind the
firing-line, but while the battle is still in progress
you cannot expect figures from the advancing
French units.”

“It’s not what we expect,” Granger said, “it’s what
the Etat Major knows or not. Are you seriously
telling us that platoons do not report their casualties
as they happen by walkie-talkie?”

The colonel’s temper was beginning to fray. If
only, I thought, he had called our bluff from the
starf and told us firmly that he knew the figures but
wouldn’t say. After all it was their war, not ours.
We had no God-given right to information. We
didn’t have to fight Left-Wing deputies in Paris as
well as the troops of Ho Chi Minli between the Red
and the Black Rivers. We were not dying.

The colonel suddenly snapped out the informa-
tion that French casualties had been in a proportion
of one in three, then turned his back on us, to stare
furiously at his map. These were his men who were
dead, his fellow officers, belonging to the same class
at St. Cyr — not numerals as they were to Granger.
Granger said, “Now we are getting somewhere,”
and stared round with oafish triumph at his fellows;
the French with heads bent made their sombre notes.
“That’s more than can be said in Korea,” I said
with deliberate misunderstanding, but I had only
given Granger a new line.

“Ask the colonel,” he said, “what the French are

78

going to do next? He says the enemy is on the run
across the Black River. . .

“Red River,” the interpreter corrected him.

“I don’t care what the colour of the river is.
What we want to know is what the French are going
to do now.”

“The enemy are in flight.”

“What happens when they get to the other side?
What are you going to do then? Arc you just going
to sit down on the other bank and say that’s over?”
The French officers listened with gloomy patience
to Granger’s bullying voice. Even humility is
required today of the soldier. “Arc you going to
drop them Christmas cards?”

The captain interpreted with care, even to the
phrase, “cartes de Noel.” The colonel give us a
wintry smile. “Not Christmas cards,” he said.

1 think the colonel’s youth and beauty' particularly
irritated Granger. The colonel wasn’t — at least not
by Granger’s interpretation — a man’s man. He
said, “You aren’t dropping much else.”

The colonel spoke suddenly in English, good
English. He said, “If the supplies promised by the
Americans had arrived, we should have more to
drop.” He was really in spite of his elegance a
simple man. He believed that a newspaper corre-
spondent cared for his cour try’s honour more than
for news. Granger said sharply (he was efficient:
he kept dates well in his head), “You mean that
none of the supplies promised for the beginning of
September have arrived?”

“No.”

Granger had got his news: he began to write.

79

“I am sorry,” the colonel said, “that is not for
printing: that is for background.”

“But, colonel,” Granger protested, “that’s news.
We can help you there.”

“No, it is a matter for the diplomats.”

“What harm can it do?”

The French correspondents were at a loss: they
could speak very little English. The colonel had
broken the rules. They muttered angrily together.

“I am no judge,” the colonel said. “Perhaps the
American newspapers would say, ‘Oh, the French
are always complaining, always begging.’ And in
Paris the Communists would accuse, ‘The French are
spilling their blood for America and America will
not even send a second-hand helicopter.’ It docs no
goocl. At the end of it we should still have no
helicopters, and the enemy would still be there, fifty'
miles from Hanoi.”

“At least I can print that, can’t I, that you need
helicopters bad?”

“You can^say,” the colonel said, “that six months
ago wc had three helicopters and now we have one.
One,” he repeated with a kind of amazed bitterness.
“You can say that if a man is wounded in this
fighting, not seriously wounded, just wounded, he
knows that he is probably a dead man. Twelve
hours, twenty-four hours perhaps, on a stretcher to
the ambulance, then bad tracks, a breakdown,
perhaps an ambush, gangrene. It is better tc* be
killed outright.” The French correspondents leant
forward, trying to understand. “You can write
that,” he said, looking all the more venomous for
his physical beauty. “Interpretcz,” he ordered, and

80

walked out of the room, leaving the captain the
unfamiliar task of translating from English into
French.

“Got him on the raw,” said Granger with satis-
faction, and he went into a corner by the bar to
write his telegram. Mine didn’t take long: there was
nodiing I could write from Phat Diem that the
censors would pass. If the story had seemed good
enough I could have flown to Hong Kong and sent
it from there, but was any news good enough to risk
expulsion? I doubted it. Expulsion meant the end
of a whole life: it meant the victory of Pyle, and
there, when T returned to my hotel, waiting in my
pigeon-hole, was in fact his victory, the end — the
congratulatory telegram of promotion. Dante |jevcr
thought up that turn of the screw for his condemned
lovers. Paolo was never promoted to the Purgatorio.

I went upstairs to my bare room and the dripping
cold-water tap (there was no hot water in Hanoi)
and sat on the edge of my bed with the bundle of the
mosquito-net like a swollen cloud overhead. I was
to be the new foreign editor, arriving every after-
noon at half past three, at that grim Victorian
building near Blackfriars station with a plaque of
Lord Salisbury by the lift. They had sent the good
news on from Saigon, and I wondered whether it
had already reached Phuong’s ears. I was to be a
reporter no longer: I was to have opinions, and in
re&irn for that empty privilege I was deprived of
my last hope in the contest with Pyle. I had experi-
ence to match his virginity, age was as good a card
to play in the sexual game as youth, but now I
hadn’t even the limited future of twelve more

81

months to offer, and a future was trumps. I envied
the most homesick officer condemned to the chance
of death. I would have liked to weep, but the ducts
were as dry as the hot-water pipes. Oh, they could
have home — I only wanted my room in the rue
Catinat.

It was cold after dark in Hanoi and the lights were
lower than those of Saigon, more suited to the darker
clothes of the women and the fact of war. I walked
up the rue Gambetta to the Pax Bar — I didn’t
want to drink in the Metropole with the senior
French officers, their wives and their girls, and as I
reached the bar I was aware of tlifc distant drumming
of the guns out towards Hoa Binh. In the day they
were^drowned in traffic noises, but everything was
quiet now except for the tring of bicycle-bells where
the trishaw-drivers plied for hire. Pietri sat in his
usual place. He had an odd elongated skull which
sat on his shoulders like a pear on a dish; he was a
Surete officer and was married to a pretty Tonkinese
who owned the Pax Bar. He was another man who
had no particular desire to go home. He was a
Corsican, but he preferred Marseilles, and to
Marseilles he preferred any day his seat on the
pavement in the rue Gambetta. I wondered
whether he already knew the contents of my
telegram.

“Quatre Vingt-et-un?” he asked.

“Why not?”

We began to throw and it seemed impossible to
me that I could ever have a life again, away from
the rue Gambetta and the rue Catinat, the flat
taste of vermouth cassis, the homely click of dice,

82

and the gunfire travelling like a clock-hand around
the horizon.

I said, “I’m going back.”

“Home?” Pietri asked, throwing a four-two-one.
“No. England.”

83

PART TWO

CHAPTER I

Pyle had invited himself for what he called a
drink, but I knew very well he didn’t really drink.
After the passage of weeks that fantastic meeting in
Phat Diem seemed hardly believable: even the
details of the conversation were less clear. They
were like the missing letters on a Roman tomb and I
the archaeologist filling in the gaps according to the
bias of my scholarship. It even occurred to me that
he had been pulling my leg, and that the conversa-
tion had been an elaborate and humorous disguise
for his real purpose, for it was already the gossip of
Saigon that he was engaged in one of those services
so ineptly called secret. Perhaps he was arranging
American arms for a Third Force — the Bishop’s
brass band, all that was left of his young scared
unpaid levies. The telegram that had awaited me in
Hanoi I kept in my pocket. There was no point in
telling Phuong, for that would be to poison the few
months we had left with tears and quarrels. I
wouldn’t even go for my exit-permit till the last
moment in case she had a relation in the immigra-
tion-Affice.

I told her, “Pyle’s coming at six.”

“I will go and see my sister,” she said.

“I expect he’d like to see you.”

“He does not like me or ray family. When you

87

were away he did not come once to my sister,
although she had invited him. She was very hurt.”

“You needn’t go out.”

“If he wanted to see me, he would have asked us
to the Majestic. He wants to talk to you privately —
about business.”

“What is his business?”

“People say he imports a great many things.”

“What things?”

“Drugs, medicines . . .”

“Those are for the trachoma teams in the north.”

“Perhaps. The Customs must not open them.
They are diplomatic parcels. But once there was a
mistake — the man was discharged. The First
Secretary threatened to stop all imports.”

“What was in the case?”

“Plastic.”

I said idly, “What did they want plastic for?”

When Phuong had gone, I wrote home. A man
from Reuter’s was leaving for Hong Kong in a few
days and he could mail my letter from there. 1
knew my appeal was hopeless, but I was not going
to reproach myself later for not taking every possible
measure. I wrote to the Managing Editor that this
was the wrong moment to change their corre-
spondent. General de Lattre was dying in Paris:
the French were about to withdraw altogether from
Hoa Binh: the north had never been in greater
danger. I wasn’t suitable, I told him, for a foreign
editor — I was a reporter, I had no real opinions
about anything. On the last page I even appealed
to him on personal grounds, although it was unlikely
that any human sympathy could survive under the

88

strip-light, among the green eye-shades and the
stereotyped phrases — "the good of the paper,” "the
situation demands . . .”

I wrote: "For private reasons I am very unhappy
at being moved from Vietnam. I don’t think I can
do my best work in England, where there will be
not only financial but family strains. Indeed, if I
could afford it I would resign rather than return to
the U.K. I only mention this as showing the strength
of my objection. I don’t think you have found me a
bad correspondent, and this is the first favour I have
ever asked of you.” Then I looked over my article
on the battle of Phat Diem, so that I could send it
out to be posted under a Hong Kong date-line. The
French would not seriously object now — the siege
had been raised: a defeat could be played as a
victory. Then 1 tore up the last page of my letter to
the editor: it was no use — the ‘private reasons’ would
become only the subject of sly jokes. Every corre-
spondent, it was assumed, had his local girl. The
editor would joke to the night editor, who would take
the envious thought back to his semi-detached villa
at Streatham and climb into bed with it beside the
faithful wife he had carried with him years back from
Glasgow. I could see so well the kind of house that
has no mercy — a broken tricycle stood in the hall
and somebody had broken his favourite pipe; and
there was a child’s shirt in the living-room waiting
for % button to be sewn on. ‘Private reasons’:
drinking in the Press Club I wouldn’t want to be
reminded by their jokes of Phuong.

There was a knock on the door. I opened it to
Pyle and his black dog walked in ahead of him.

89

D

Pyle looked over my shoulder and found the room
empty. “I’m alone,” I said. “Phuong is with her
sister.” He blushed. I noticed that he was wearing
a Hawaii_ shirt, even though it was comparatively
restrained in colour and design. I was surprised:
had he been accused of un-American activities? He
said, “I hope I haven’t interrupted . . .”

“Of course not. Have a drink?”

“Thanks. Beer?”

“Sorry. We haven’t a frig — we send out for ice.
What about a Scotch?”

“A small one, if you don’t mind. I’m not very
keen on hard liquor.”

“On the rocks?”

“Plenty of soda — if you aren’t short.”

I said, “I haven’t seen you since Phat Diem.”

“You got my note, Thomas?”

When he used my Christian name, jt was like a
declaration that he hadn’t been humorous, that he
hadn’t been covering up, that he was here to get
Phuong. I noticed that his crew-cut had recently
been trimmed; was even the Hawaii shirt serving
the function of male plumage?

“I got your note,” I said. “I suppose I ought to
knock you down.”

“Of course,” he said, “you’ve every right, Thomas.
But I did boxing at college — and I’m so much
younger.”

“No, it wouldn’t be a good move for me, would
it.”

“You know, Thomas (I’m sure you feel the same),
I don’t like discussing Phuong behind her back. I
thought she would be here.”

90

“Well, what shall we discuss — plastic?” I hadn’t
meant to surprise him.

He said, “You know about that?”

“Phuong told me.”

“How could she . . . ?”

“You can be sure it’s all over the town. What’s
so important about it? Are you going into the toy
business?”

“We don’t like the details of our aid to get around.
You know what Congress is like — and then one has
visiting Senators. We had a lot of trouble about our
trachoma teams because they were using one drug
instead of another.”

“I still don’t understand the plastic.”

His black dog sat on the floor taking up top mvjph
room, panting; its tongue looked like a burnt pan-
cake. Pyle said vaguely, “Oh, you know, we want
to get some of these local industries on their feet,
and we have to be careful of the French. They want
everything bought in France.”

“I don’t blame them. A war needs money.”

“Do you like dogs?”

“No.”

“I thought the Bri'ish were great dog lovers.”

“We think Americans love dollars, but there must
be exceptions.”

“I don’t know how I’d get along without Duke.
You know, sometimes I feel so darned lonely. . . .”

“tt>u ’ve got a great many companions in your
branch.”

“The first dog I ever had was called Prince. I
called him after the Black Prince. You know, the
fellow who . . .”

9i

“Massacred all the women and children in
Limoges.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“The history books gloss it over.”

I was to see many times that look of pain and dis-
appointment touch his eyes and mouth, when reality
didn’t match the romantic ideas he cherished, or
when someone he loved or admired dropped below
the impossible standard he had set. Once, I remem-
ber, I caught York Harding out in a gross error of
fact, and I had to comfort him: “It’s human to make
mistakes.” He had laughed nervously and said,
“You must think me a fool, but — well, I almost
thought him infallible.” He added, “My father took
to f him a lot the only time they met, and my father’s
darned difficult to please.”

The big black dog called Duke, having panted
long enough to establish a kind of right to the air,
began to poke about the room. “Could you ask your
dog to be still?” I said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. Duke. Duke. Sit down,
Duke.” Duke sat down and began noisily to lick his
private parts. I filled our glasses and managed in
passing to disturb Duke’s toilet. The quiet lasted a
very short time; he began to scratch himself.

“Duke’s awfully intelligent,” said Pyle.

“What happened to Prince?”

“We were down on the farm in Connecticut and
he got run over.”

“Were you upset?”

“Oh, I minded a lot. He meant a great deal to
me, but you have to be sensible. Nothing could bring
him back.”

92

“And if you lose Phuong, will you be sensible?”

“Oh yes, I hope so. And you?”

“I doubt it. I might even run amok. Have you
thought about that, Pyle?”

“I wish you’d call me Alden, Thomas.”

“I’d rather not. Pyle has got — associations. Have
you thought about it?”

“Of course I haven’t. You’re the straightest guy
I’ve ever known. When I remember how you
behaved when I barged in . . .”

“I remember thinking before I went to sleep how
convenient it would be if there were an attack and
you were killed. A hero’s death. For Democracy.”

“Don’t laugh at me, Thomas.” He shifted his
long limbs uneasily. “I must seem a bit dumbto yqjx,
but I know when you’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“I know if you come clean you want what’s best
for her.”

It was then I heard Phuong’s step. I had hoped
against hope that he would have gone before she
returned. He heard it too and recognised it. He
said, “There she is,” although he had had only one
evening to learn her footfall. Even the dog got up
and stood by the door, which I had left open for
coolness, almost as though he accepted her as one of
Pyle’s family. I was an intruder.

Phuong said, “My sister was not in,” and looked
guardedly at Pyle.

I wondered whether she were telling the truth or
whether her sister had ordered her to hurry back.

“You remember M. Pyle?” I said.

“Enchanl^c.” She was on nor best behaviour.

93

“I’m so pleased to see you again,” he said,
blushing.

“Comment?”

“Her English is not very good,” I said.

“I’m afraid my French is awful. I’m taking lessons
though. And I can understand — if Miss Phuong will
speak slowly.”

“I’ll act as interpreter,” I said. “The local accent
takes some getting used to. Now what do you want
to say? Sit down, Phuong. M. Pyle has come
specially to see you. Are you sure,” I added to
Pyle, “that you wouldn’t like me to leave you two
alone?”

“I want you to hear everything I have to say. It
wouldn’t be fair otherwise.”

“Well, fire away.”

He said solemnly, as though this part he had
learned by heart, that he had a great love and
respect for Phuong. He had felt it ever since the
night he had danced with her. I was reminded a
little of a butler showing a party of tourists over a
“great house”. The great house was his heart, and
of the private apartments where the family lived we
were given only a rapid and surreptitious glimpse. I
translated for him with meticulous care — it sounded
worse that way, and Phuong sat quiet with her hands
in her lap as though she were listening to a movie.

“Has she understood that?” he asked.

“As far as I can tell. You don’t want me to'add a
little fire to it, do you?”

“Oh no,” he said, “just translate. I don’t want to
sway her emotionally.”

“I see.”

94

"Tell her I want to marry her.”

I told her.

“What was that she said?”

“She asked me if you were serious. I told her you
were the serious type.”

“I suppose this is an odd situation,” he said. “Me
asking you to translate.”

“Rather odd.”

“And yet it seems so natural. After all you are my
best friend.”

“It’s kind of you to say so.”

“There’s nobody I’d go to in trouble sooner than
you,” he said.

“And I suppose being in love with my girl is a
kind of trouble?”

“Of course. I wish it was anybody but you,
Thomas.”

“Well, what do I say to her next. That you can’t
live without her?”

“No, that’s too emotional. It’s not quite true
either. I’d have to go away, o i course, but one gets
over everything.”

“While you are thinking what to say, do you mind
if I put in a word for myself?”

“No, of course not, it’s only lair, Thomas.”

“Well, Phuong,” I said, “are you going to leave
me for him? He’ll marry you. I can’t. You know
why.”

“Afe you going away?” she asked and I thought
of the editor’s letter in my pocket.

“No.”

“Never?”

“How can one promise that? He can’t either.

95

Marriages break. Often they break quicker than an
affair like ours.”

“I do not want to go,” she said, but the sentence
was not comforting: it contained an unexpressed
‘but’.

Pyle said, “I think I ought to put all my cards
on the table. I’m not rich. But when my father
dies I’ll have about fifty thousand dollars. I’m in
good health — I’ve got a medical certificate only
two months old, and I can let her know my blood-
count.”

“I don’t know how to translate that. What’s it
for?”

“Well, to make certain we can have children
together.”

“Is that how you make love in America — figures
of income and a blood-count?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never done it before. Maybe
at home my mother would talk to her mother.”

“About your blood-count?”

“Don’tji laugh at me, Thomas. I expect I’m old-
fashioned. You know I’m a bit lost in this situation.”

“So am I. Don’t you think we might call it off
and dice for her?”

“Now you are pretending to be tough, Thomas.
1 know you love her in your way as much as I do.”

“Well, go on, Pyle.”

“Tell her I don’t expect her to love me right away.
That will come in time, but tell her what 1 o3er is
security and respect. That doesn’t sound very
exciting, but perhaps it’s better than passion.”

“She can always get passion,” I said, “with your
chauffeur when you are away at the office.”

9*>

Pyle blushed. He got awkwardly to his feet and
said, “That’s a dirty crack. I won’t have her
insulted. You’ve no right . . .**

“She’s not your wife yet.”

“What can you offer her?” he asked with anger.
"A couple of hundred dollars when you leave for
England, or will you pass her on with the furniture?”

“The furniture isn’t mine.”

“She’s not either. Phuong, will you marry me?”

“What about the blood-count?” I said. “And a
health certificate. You’ll need hers, surely? Maybe
you ought to have mine too. And her horoscope —
no, that is an Indian custom.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Say it in French,” I said. “I’m damned if J’ll
interpret for you any more.”

I got to my feet and the dog growled. It made me
furious. “Tell your damned Duke to be quiet. This
is my home, not his.”

“Will you marry me?” he repeated. I took a step
towards Phuong and the dog growled again.

I said to Phuong, “Tell him to go away and take
his dog with him.”

“Gome away with me now,” Pyle said. “Avec
nioi.”

“No,” Phuong said, “no.” Suddenly all the anger
in both of us vanished: it was a problem as simple as
that: it could be solved with a word of two letters. I
felt an enormous relief; Pyle stood there with his
mouth a little open and an expression of bewilder-
ment on his face. He said, “She said no.”

“She knows that much English.” I wanted to
laugh now: what fools we had both made of each

97

other. I said, “Sit down and have another Scotch,
Pyle.”

“I think I ought to go.”

“One for the road.”

“Mustn’t drink all your whisky,” he muttered.

“I get all I want through the Legation.” I moved
towards the table and the dog bared its teeth.

Pyle said furiously, “Down, Duke. Behave
yourself.” He wiped the sweat off his forehead.
“I’m awfully sorry, Thomas, if I said anything I
shouldn’t. I don’t know what came over me.” He
took the glass and said wistfully, “The best man wins.
Only please don’t leave her, Thomas.”

“Of course I shan’t leave her,” I said.

Phuong said to me, “Would he like to smoke a
pipe?”

“Would you like to smoke a pipe?”

“No, thank you. I don’t touch opiujn and w'e have
strict rules in the service. I’ll just drink this up and
be off. I’m sorry about Duke. He’s very quiet as a
rule.” ,

“Stay to supper.”

“I think, if you don’t mind, I’d rather be alone.”
He gave an uncertain grin. “I suppose people would
say we’d both behaved rather strangely. I wish you
could marry her, Thomas.”

“Do you really?”

“Yes. Ever since I saw that place — you know, that
house near the Chalet — I’ve been so afraid.” <»

He drank his unaccustomed whisky quickly, not
looking at Phuong, and when he said goodbye he
didn’t touch her hand, but gave an awkward little
bobbing bow. I noticed how her eyes followed him

98

to the door and as I passed the mirror I saw myself:
the top button of my trousers undone, the beginning
of a paunch. Outside he said, “I promise not to see
her, Thomas. You won’t let this interfere between
us, will you? I’ll get a transfer when I finish my
tour,”

“When’s that?”

“About two years.”

I went back to the room and I thought, ‘What’s
the good? I might as well have told them both that
I was going.’ He had only to carry his bleeding heart
for a few weeks as a decoration. . . . My lie would
even ease his conscience.

“Shall I make you a pipe?” Phuong asked.

“Yes, in a moment. I just want to write a letjpr.”

It was the second letter of the day, but I tore none
of this up, though I had as little hope of a response.
I wrote: “Dear Helen, I am coming back to England
next April to take the job of foreign editor. You can
imagine I am not very happy about it. England is
to me the scene of my failure. I had intended our
marriage to last quite as much as if I had shared
your Christian beliefs. To this day I’m not certain
what went wrong (I know we both tried), but I
think it was my temper. I know how cruel and bad
my temper can be. Now I think it’s a little better —
the East has done that lor me — not sweeter, but
quieter. Perhaps it’s simply that I’m five years
oldffr — at that end of life when five years becomes a
high proportion of what’s left. You have been very
generous to me, and you have never reproached me
once since our separation. Would you be even more
generous? I know that before we married you

99

warned me there could never be a divorce. I
accepted the risk and I’ve nothing to complain of.
At the same time I’m asking for one now.”

Phuong called out to me from the bed that she had
the tray ready.

“A moment,” I said.

’“I could wrap this up,” I wrote, “and make it
sound more honourable and more dignified by
pretending it was for someone rise’s sake. But it’
isn’t, and we always used to tell each other the
truth. It’s foi* my sake and only mine. I love
someone very much, wc have lived together for
more than two years, she has been very loyal to me,
but I know I’m not essential to her. If I leave her,
she’ f U be a little unhappy I think, but there won’t be
any tragedy. She’ll marry someone else and have a
family. It’s stupid of me to tell you this. I’m putting
a reply into your mouth. But because I’ve been
truthful so far, perhaps you’ll believe me when 1
tell you that to lose her will be, for me, the beginning
of death. I’m not asking you to be ‘reasonable’
(reason is all on your side) or to be merciful. It’s
too big a word for my situation and anyway I don’t
particularly deserve mercy. I suppose what I’m
really asking you is to behave, all of a sudden,
irrationally, out of character. I want you to feel—
(I hesitated over the word and then I*didn’t get it
right) affection and to act before you have time to
think. I know that’s easier done over a telepKone
than over eight thousand miles. If only you’d just
cable me ‘I agree’!”

When 1 had finished I felt as though I had run a
long way and strained unconditioned muscles. I

ioo

lay down on the bed while Phuong made my pipe.
I said, “He’s young.”

“Who?”

“Pyle.”

“That’s not so important.”

“1 would marry you if I could, Phuong.”

“I think so, but my sister docs not believe it.”

“I have just written to my wife and 1 have asked
her to divorce me. I have never tried before. There
is always a chance.”

“A big chance?”

“No, but a small one.”

“Don’t worry. Smoke.”

I drew in the smoke and she began to prepare my
second pipe. I asked her again, “Was your syster
really not at home, Phuong?”

“I told you — she was out.” It was absurd to
subject her to this passion for truth, an Occidental
passion, like the passion for alcohol. Because of the
whisky I had drunk with Pyle, the effect of the
opium was lessened. I said, “I lied to you, Phuong.
I have been ordered home.”

She put the pipe down. “But you won’t go?”

“If I refused, wh t would we live on?”

“I could come with you. I would like to see
London.” ,

“It would be very uncomfortable for you if we
were not married.”

“But perhaps vour wife will divorce you.”

“Perhaps.”

“I will come with you anyway,” she said. She
meant it, but I could see in her eyes the long train of
thought begin, as she lifted the pipe again and began

ioi

to warm the pellet of opium. She said, “Are there
skyscrapers in London?” and I loved her for the
innocence of her question. She might lie from
politeness, from fear, even for profit, but she would
never have the cunning to keep her lie concealed,.

“No,” I said, “you have to go to America for
them.”

She gave^me a quick look over the needle and
registered her mistake. Then as she kneaded the
opium she began to talk at random of what clothes
she would wear in London, where we should live, of
the Tube-trains she had read about in a novel, and
the double-decker buses: would we fly or go by sea?
“And the Statue of Liberty . . .” she said.

“No, Phuong, that’s American too.”

102

CHAPTER II

(0

At least once a year the Caodaists hold a
festival at the Holy See in Tanyin, which lies eighty
kilometres to the north-west of Saigon, to celebrate
such and such a year of Liberation, or of Conquest,
or even a Buddhist, Confucian or Christian festival.
Caodaism was always the favourite chapter ofjny
briefing to visitors. Caodaism, the invention of a
Cochin civil servant, was a synthesis of the three
religions. The Holy See was at Tanyin. A Pope and
female cardinals. Prophecy by planchette. Saint
Victor Hugo. Christ and Buddha looking down
from the roof of the Cathedral on a Walt Disney
fantasia of the East, dragons and snakes in techni-
colour. Newcomers were always delighted with the
description. How could one explain the dreariness
of the whole business: the private army of twenty-
five thousand men, armed with mortars made out of
the exhaust-pipes of old cars , allies of the French who
turned neutral at the moment of danger? To these
celebrations, which helped to keep the peasants
quiet, the Pope invited members of the Government
(who would turn up if the Caodaists at the moment
held office), the Diplomatic Corps (who would send
a few second secretaries wi!h their wives or girls)

103

and the French Commander-in-Chief, who would
detail a two-star general from an office job to
represent him.

Along the route to Tanyin flowed a fast stream of
staff and C.D. cars, and on the more exposed
sections of the road Foreign Legionaries threw out
cover across the rice fields. It was always a day of
some anxiety for the French High Command and
perhaps of a certain hope for the Caodaists, for what
could more painlessly emphasise their own loyalty
than to have a few important guests shot outside
their territory?

Every kilometre a small mud watch-tower stood
up above the flat fields like an exclamation mark,
an<| every ten kilometres there was a larger fort
manned by a platoon of Legionaries, Moroccans or
Senegalese. Like the traffic into New York the cars
kept one pace — and as with the traffic into New York
you had a sense of controlled impatience, watching
the next car ahead and in the mirror the car behind.
Everybody wanted to reach Tanyin, see the show and
get back as quickly as possible: curfew was at seven.

One passed out of the French-controlled rice
fields into the rice fields of the Hoa-Haos and thence
into the rice fields of the Caodaists, who were usually
at war with the Hoa-Haos: only the flags changed on
the watch-towers. Small naked boys sat on the
buffaloes which waded genital-deep among the
irrigated fields; where the gold harvest was rtady
die peasants in their hats like limpets winnowed the
rice against little curved shelters of plaited bamboo.
The cars drove rapidly by, belonging to another
world.

104

Now the churches of the Caodaists would catch
the attention of strangers in every village; pale blue
and pink plastcrwork and a big eye of God over the
door. Flags increased: troops of peasants made their
way along the road: we were approaching the Holy
See. In the distance the sacred mountain stood like
a green bowler hat above Tanyin — that was where
General The held out, the dissident Chief of Staff
who had recently declared his intention of fighting
both the French and the Victminh. The Caodaists
made no attempt to capture him, although he had
kidnapped a cardinal, but it was rumoured that he
had done it with the Pope’s connivance.

It always seemed hotter in Tanyin than anywhere
else in the Southern Delta; perhaps it was the absence
of water, perhaps it was the sense of interminable
ceremonies which made one sweat vicariously, sweat
for the troops standing to attention through the long
speeches in a language they didn’t understand,
sweat for the Pope in his heavy chinoiseric robes.
Only the female cardinals in their white silk trousers
chatting to the priests in sun-helmets gave an
impression of coolness under the glare: you couldn’t
believe it would ever be seven o’clock and cocktail-
time on the roof of the Majestic, with a wind from
Saigon river.

After the parade I interviewed the Pope’s deputy.
I didn’t expect to get anytning out of him and I was
right: it was a convention on both sides. I asked
him about General The.

“A rash man,” he said and dismissed the subject.
He began his set speech, forgetting that I had hcardf
it two years before: it reminded me of my own

105

gramophone records for new-comers: Caodaism was
a religious synthesis ... the best of all religions . . .
missionaries had been despatched to Los Angeles . . .
the secrets of the Great Pyramid. He wore a long
white soutane and he chain-smoked. There was
something cunning and corrupt about him: the word
‘love* occurred often. I was certain he knew that
all of us were there to laugh at his movement; our
air of respect was as corrupt as his phoney hierarchy,
but we were less cunning. Our hypocrisy gained us
nothing — not even a reliable ally, while theirs had
procured arms, supplies, even cash down.

“Thank you, your Eminence.” I got up to go. He
came with me to the door, scattering cigarette ash.

“Clod’s blessing on your work,” he said unctuously.
“Remember God loves the truth.”

“Which truth?” I asked.

“In the Caodaist faith all truths aee reconciled
and truth is love.”

He had a large ring on his finger and, when he
held out his hand I really think he expected me to
kiss it, but I am not a diplomat.

Under the bleak vertical sunlight I saw Pyle: he
was trying in vain to make his Buick start. Some-
how, during the last two weeks, at the bar of the
Continental, in the only good bookshop, in the rue
Catinat, I had continually run into Pyle. The
friendship which he had imposed from the beginning
he now emphasised more than ever. His sad efyes
would inquire mutely after Phuong, while his lips
expressed with even more fervour the strength of his
affection and of his admiration — God save the mark
— for me.

106

A Caodaist commandant stood beside the car
talking rapidly. He stopped when I came up. I
recognised .him — he had been one of The’s assis-
tants before The took to the hills.

“Hullo, commandant,” I said, “how’s the
General?”

“Which general?” he asked with a shy grin.

“Surely in the Caodaist faith,” I said, “all generals
are reconciled.”

“I can’t make this car move, Thomas,” Pyle said.

“I will get a mechanic,” the commandant said,
and left us.

“I interrupted you.”

“Oh, it was nothing,” Pyle said. “He wanted to
know how much a Euick cost. These people age so
friendly when you treat them right. The French
don’t seem to know how to handle them.”

“The French don’t trust them.”

Pyle said solemnly, “A man becomes trustworthy
when you trust him.” It sounded like a Caodaist
maxim. I began to feel the air of Tanyin was too
ethical for me to breathe.

“Have a drink,” Pyle said.

“There’s nothing I’d like better.”

“I brought a thermos of lime-juice with me.” He
leant over and busied himself with a basket in the
back.

“Any gin?”

“tto, I’m awfully sorry. You know,” he said
encouragingly, “li?ne juice is very good for you in
this climate. It contains — I’m not sure which
vitamins.” He held out a cup to me and I drank.

“Anyway, it’s wet,” I said.

107

“Like a sandwich? They’re really awfully good.
A new sandwich-mixture called Vit-Health. My
mother sent it from the States.”

“No, thanks, I’m not hungry.”

“It tastes rather like Russian salad — only sort of
drier.”

“I don’t think I will.”

“You don’t mind if I do?”

“No, no, of course not.”

He took a large mouthful and it crunched and
crackled. In the distance Buddha in white and
pink stone rode away from his ancestral home and his
valet — another statue — pursued him running* The
female cardinals were drifting back to their house
and, the Eye of God watched us from above the
Cathedral door.

“You know they are serving lunch here?” I said.

“I thought J wouldn’t risk it. The meat — you
have to be careful in this heat.”

“You arc quite safe. They are vegetarian.”

“I suppose it's all right — but 1 like to know what
I’m eating.” He took another munch at his Vit-
Health. “Do you think they have any reliable
mechanics?”

“They know enough to turn your exhaust pipe
into a mortar. I believe Buicks make the best
mortars.”

The commandant returned and, saluting us smart-
ly, said he had sent to the barracks tor a mechanic.
Pyle ofFcred him a Vit-Health sandwich, which he
refused politely. He said with a inan-of-the-world
air, “We have so many rules here about food.” (He
spoke excellent English.) “So- foolish. But you

108

know what it is in a religious capital. I expect it is
the same thing in Rome — or Canterbury,” he added
with a neat natty little bow to me. Then he was
silent. They were both silent. I had a strong
impression that my company was not wanted. I
couldn’t resist the temptation to tease Pyle — it is,
af^r all, the weapon Of weakness and I was weak. I
hadn’t youth, seriousness, integrity, a future. I said,
“Perhaps after all I’ll have a sandwich.”

“Oh, of course,”. Pyle said, “of course.” He
paused before turning to the basket in the back.

“No, no,” I said. “I was only joking. You two
want to be alone.”

“Nothing of the kind,” Pyle said. He was one of
the most, inefficient liars I have ever know?} — itgwas
an art he had obviously never practised. He
explainedto' the- commandant, “Thomas here’s the
best friend I have.”

“I know Mr. Fowler,” the commandant said.

“I’ll see you before I go, Pyle.” And I walked
away to the Cathedral. I could get some coolness
there. ,

Saint Victor Hugo in thd uniform of the French
Academy with a hrtlo round his tricorn hat pointed
at some noble sentiment Sun Yat Sen was inscribing
on a tablet, and then I was in the nave. There was
nowhere to sit except in the Papal chair, round which
a plaster cobra coiled, the marble floor glittered like
water and there was no glass in the windows — we
make a cage for air with holes, I thought, and man
makes a cage for his religion in much the same way —
with doubts left open to the weather and creeds
opening on innumerable interpretations. My wife

109

had found her cage with holes and sometimes I
envied her. There is a conflict between sun and air:
I lived too much in the sun.

I walked the long empty nave — this was not the
Indo-China I loved. The dragons with lion-like
heads climbed the pulpit: on the roof Christ exposed
his bleeding heart. Buddha sat, as Buddha always
sits, with his lap empty: Confucius’s beard hung
meagrely down like a waterfall in the dry season.
This was play-acting: the great globe above the
altar was ambition: the basket with the movable lid
in which the Pope worked his prophecies was
trickery. If this Cathedral had existed for five
centuries instead of two decades, would it have
gathered a kind of convincingness with the scratches
of feet and the erosion of weather? Would somebody
who was convincible -like my wife find here a faith
she couldn’t find in human beings? ‘And if I had
really wanted faith would I have found it in her
Norman church? But I had never desired faith.
The job of a reporter is to expose and record. I had
never in my career discovered the inexplicable. The
Pope worked his prophecies with a pencil in a
movable lid and the people believed. In any vision
somewhere you could find the planchette. I had no
visions or miracles in my repertoire of memory.

I turned my memories over at random like
pictures in an album: a fox I had seen by the light
of an enemy flare over Orpington stealing aiong
beside a fowl run, out of his russet place in the
marginal country: the body of a bayoneted Malay
which a Gurkha patrol had broughtat the back of a
lorry into a mining camp in Pahang, and the Chinese

no

coolies stood by and giggled with nerves, while a
brother Malay put a cushion under the dead head:
a pigeon on a mantelpiece, poised for flight in a
hotel bedroom: my wife’s face at a window wj^en I
came home to say goodbye for the last time. My
thoughts had begun and ended with her. She must
have received my letter more than a week ago, and
the cable I did not expect had not come. But they
say if a jury remains out for long enough there is
hope for the prisoner. In another week if no letter
arrived could I begin to hope? All round me I
could hear the cars of the soldiers and the diplomats
revving up: the party was over 'for another year.
The stampede back to Saigon was beginning, and
curfew called. I went out to look for Pyle.

He was standing in a patch of shade with the
commandant, and no one was doing anything to his
car. The, conversation seemed to be over, whatever
it had been about, and they stood silently there,
constrained by mutual politeness. I joined them.

“Well,” 1 said, “I think I’ll be off. You’d better
be leaving too if you want to be in before curfew.”

“The mechanic hasn’t turned up.”

“He will come soon,” the commandant said. “He
was in the parade.”

“You could spend the night,” I said. “There’s a
special Mass — you’ll find it quite an experience. It
lasts three hours.”

“4 ought to get back.”

“You won’t get back unless you start now.” I
added unwillingly, “I’ll give you a lift if you like
and the commandant can have your car sent in to
Saigon tomorrow.”

in

“You need not bother about curfew in Caodaist
territory,” the commandant said smugly. “But
beyond . . . Certainly I will have your car sent
tomorrow.”

“Exhaust intact,” I said, and he smiled brightly,
neatly, efficiently, a military abbreviation of a smile.

( 2 )

The procession of cars was well ahead of us by
the time , we started. I put on speed to try to over-
take it, but we had passed out of the Caodaist zone
into the zone of the Hoa-Haos with not even a dust
cloud ahead of us. The world was flat and empty in
the jvening.

It was not the kind of country one associates with
ambush, but men could conceal themselves neck-
deep in the drowned fields within a few yards of
the road.

Pyle cleared his throat and it was the signal for an
approaching intimacy. “I hope Phuong’s well,”
he said.

“I’ve never known her ill.” One watch-tower
sank behind, another appeared, like weights on a
balance.

“I saw her sister out shopping yesterday.”

“And I suppose she asked you to look in,” I said.

“As a matter of fact she did.”

“She doesn’t give up hope easily.”

“Hope?”

“Of marrying you to Phuong.”

“She told me you are going away.”

“These rumours get about.”

1 12

Pyle said “You’d play straight with me, Thomas,
wouldn’t you?”

“Straight?”

“I’ve applied for a transfer,” he said. “I wouldn’t
want her to be left without either of us.”

“I thought you were going to see your tflne out.”

He said without self-pity, “I found I couldn’t
stand it.”

“When are you leaving?”

“I don’t know. They thought something could be
aranged in six months.”

“You can stand six months?”

“I’ve got to.”

“What reason did you give?”

“I told the Economic Attach^ — you met hjm —
Joe — more or less the facts.”

“I suppose he thinks I’m a bastard not to let you
walk oif with my girl.”

“Oh no, he rather sided with you.”

The car was spluttering and heaving — it had been
spluttering for a minute, I think, before I noticed it,
for I had been examining Pyle’s innocent qirt&tion:
‘Are you playing straight?’ It belonged to a psycho-
logical world of great simplicity, where you talked of
Democracy and Honor without the u as it’s spelt on
old tombstones, and you meant what your father
meant by the same words. I said, “We’ve run out.”

“Gas?”

‘•There was plenty. I crammed it full before I
started. Those bastards in Tanyin have syphoned it
out. I ought to have noticed. It’s like them to leave
us enough to get out of their zone.”

“What shall we do?”

”3

“We can just make the next watch-tower. Let’s
hope they have a little.”

B.n we were out of luck. The car reached within
thirty^yards of the tower and gave up. We walked
to the ibot of the tower and I called up in French to
the guards that we were friends, that we were coming
up. I had no wish to ; be shot by a Vietnamese
sentry. There was no reply: nobody looked out. I
said to Pyle, “Have you a gun?”

“I never carry one.”

“Nor do I.”

The last colours of sunset, green and gold like
the rice, were dripping over the edge of the flat
world: against the grey neutral sky the watch-tower
looked as black as print. It must be nearly the hour
of curfew. I shouted again and nobody answered.

“Do you know how many towers we passed since
the last fort?”

“I wasn’t noticing.”

“Nor was I.” It was probably at least six kilo-
metres to tl\e next fort — an hour’s walk. I called a
third time, and silence repeated itself like an answer.

I said, “It seems to be empty: I’d better climb up
and see.” The yellow flag with red stripes faded to
orange showed that we were out of the territory of
the Hoa-Haos and in the territory of the Vietnamese
army.

Pyle said, “Don’t you think if we waited here a
car might come?”

“It might, but they might come first.”

“Shall I go back and turn on the lights? For a
signal.”

“Good God, no. Let it be.” It was dark enough

"4

now to stumble, looking for the ladder. Something
cracked under foot; I could imagine the sound
travelling across the fields of paddy, listened y> by
whom? Pyle had lost his outline and was a wur at
the side of the road. Darkness, when on of it fell,
fell like a stone. I said, “Stay there until iTcall.” I
wondered whether the guard would have drawn up
his ladder, but there it stood — though an enemy
might climb it, it was their only way of escape. I
began to mount.

I have read so often of people’s thoughts in the
moment of fear: of God, or family, or a woman. I
admire their control. I thought of nothing, not even
of the trapdoor above me: I ceased, for those
seconds, to exist: 1 was fear taken neat. At tbp top
of the ladder I banged my head because fear couldn’t
count steps, hear, or sec. Then my head came over
the earth floor and nobody shot at me and fear
seeped away.

( 3 )

A small oil lamp burned on the floor and two men
crouched against the wall, watching me. One had
a sten gun and one a rifle, but they were as scared
as I’d been. They looked like schoolboys, but with
the Vietnamese age drops suddenly like the sun —
they are boys and then they are old men. I was glad
thift the colour of my skin and the shape of my eyes
were a passport — they wouldn’t shoot now even
from fear.

I came up out of the floor, talking to reassure
them, telling them that my car was outside, that I

“5

had run out of petrol. Perhaps they had a little I
could buy— somewhere: it didn’t seem likely as I
stared around. There was nothing in the little
round*room except a box of ammunition for the sten
gun, a’Amall wooden bed, and two packs hanging on
a nail. couple of pans with the remains of rice
and some wooden chibpsticks showed they had been
eating without much appetite.

“Just enough to get us to the next fort?” I said.

One of the men sitting against the wall— the one
with the rifle — shook his head.

“If you can’t we’ll have to stay the night here.”

“C’est defendu.”

“Who by?”

“\Jpu arc a civilian.”

“Nobody’s going to make me sit out there on the
road and have my throat cut.”

“Arc you French?”

Only one man had spoken. The other sat with
his head turned sideways, watching the slit in the
wall. He could have seen nothing but a postcard oi
sky: he seemed to be listening and I began to listen
too. The silence became full of Jound: noises you
couldn't put a name to — a crack, a creak, a rustle,
something like a cough, and a whisper. Then I
heard Pyle: he must have come to the foot of the
ladder. “You all right, Thomas?”

“Come up,” I called back. He began to climb the
ladder and the silent soldier shifted his sten gun— I
don’t believe he’d heard a word of what we’d said:
it was an awkward, jumpy movement. I realised that
fear had paralysed him. 1 rapped out at him like a
sergeant-major, “Put that gun down!” and I used

r 16

the kind of French obscenity I thought he would
recognise. He obeyed me automatically. Pyle came
up into the room. I said, “We’ve been offered^he
safety of the tower till morning.”

“Fine,” Pyle said. His voice was a little nuzzled.
He said, “Oughtn’t one of those mugs td»be on
sentry?”

“They prefer not to be shot at. I wish you’d
brought something stronger than lime-juice.”

“I guess I will next time,” Pyle said.

“We’ve got a long night ahead.” Now that Pyle
was with me, I didn’t hear the noises. Even the two
soldiers seemed to have relaxed a little.

“What happens if the Viets attack them?” Pyle
asked.

“They’ll fire a shot and run. You read it every
morning in the Extrime Orient. ‘A post south-west
of Saigon was temporarily occupied last night by the
Vietminh.’ ”

“It’s a bad prospect.”

“There are forty towers like this between us and
Saigon. The chances always are that it’s the other
chap who’s hurt.”

“We could have done with those sandwiches,”
Pyle said. “I do think one of them should keep a
look-out.”

“He’s afraid a bullet might look in.” Now that
we too had settled on the floor, the Vietnamese
relaked a little. I felt some sympathy for them: it
wasn’t an easy job for a couple of ill-trained men to
sit up here night after night, never sure of when the
Viets might creep up on the road through the fields
of paddy. I said to Pyle, “Do you think they know

117

they are fighting for Democracy? We ought to have
York Harding here to explain it to them.”

‘Wou always laugh at York,” Pyle said.

“ry laugh at anyone who spends so much time
writinV about what doesn’t exist — mental concepts.”

“The^ exist for him. Haven’t you got any mental
concepts? God, for instance?”

“I’ve no reason to believe in a God. Do you?”

“Yes. I’m a Unitarian.”

“How many hundred million Gods do people
believe in? Why, even a Roman Catholic believes in
quite a different God when he’s scared or happy or
hungry.”

“Maybe, if there is a God, he’d be so vast he’d
look different to everyone.”

“Like the great Buddha in Bangkok,” I said.
“You can’t sec all of him at once. Anyway he keeps
still.”

“I guess you’re just trying to be tough,” Pyle said.
“There’s something you must believe in. Nobody
can go on lining without some belief.”

“Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s
against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over
there.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“I even believe what I report, which is more than
most of your correspondents do.”

“Cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke — except opium. Give one to the
guards. We’d better stay friends with them.” Pyle
got up and lit their cigarettes and came back. I
said, “I wish cigarettes had a symbolic significance
like salt.”

“Don’t you trust them?”

“No French officer,” I said, “would care to spend
the night alone with two scared guards in oneJzf
these towers. Why, even a platoon have been kiwvn
to hand over their officers. Sometimes the^iets
have a better success with a megaphone man a
bazooka. I don’t blame them. They don’t believe
in anything either. You and your like are trying to
make a war with the help of people who just aren’t
interested.”

“They don’t want Communism.”

“They want enough rice,” I said. “They don’t
want to be shot at. They want one day to be much
the same as another. They don’t want our white
skins around telling them what they want.”

“If Indo-China goes . . .”

“I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes.
Indonesia goes. What does ‘go’ mean? If I believed
in your God and another life, I’d bet my future harp
against your golden crown that in five hundred years
there may be no New York or London, but they’ll be
growing paddy in these fields, they’ll be carrying
their produce to market on long poles wearing their
pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the
buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don’t like our
smell, the smell of Europeans. And remember — from
a buffalo’s point of view you are a European too.”

“They’ll be forced to believe what they are told,
they Von’ t be allowed to think for themselves.”

“Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant
sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets
inside his mud hut at night?”

“You talk as if the whole country were peasant.

XI 9

What about the educated? Are they going to be
happy?”

^Oh no,” I said, “we’ve brought them up in our
ides^ r We’ve taught them dangerous games, and
that’Ljvhy we are waiting here, hoping we don’t
get our throats cut. We deserve to have them cut. I
wish your friend York was here too. I wonder how
he’d relish it.”

“York Harding’s a very courageous man. Why,
in Korea . . .”

“He wasn’t an enlisted man, was he? He had a
return ticket. With a return ticket courage becomes
an intellectual exercise, like a monk’s flagellation.
How much can I stick? Those poor devils can’t
cafczh a plane home. Hi,” I called to them, “what
are your names?” I thought that knowledge some-
how would bring them into the circle of our con-
versation. They didn’t answer: just lowered back
at us behind the stumps of their cigarettes. “They
think we are French,” I said.

“That’s just it,” Pyle said. “You shouldn’t be
against York, you should be against the French.
Their colonialism.”

“Isms and ocracies. Give me facts. A rubber
planter beats his labourer — all right, I’m against
him. He hasn’t been instructed to do it by the
Minister of the Colonies. In France I expect he’d
beat his wife. I’ve seen a priest, so poor he hasn’t a
change of trousers, working fifteen hours a day*from
hut to hut in a cholera epidemic, eating nothing but
rice and salt fish, saying his Mass with an old cup — a
wooden platter. I don’t believe in God and yet I’m
for that priest. Why don’t you call that colonialism?”

“It is colonialism. York says it’s often the good
administrators who make it hard to change a bad
system.”

“Anyway the French are dying every day — that’s
not a mental concept. They aren’t leadineythese
people on with half-lies like your politician — and
ours. I’ve been in India, Pyle, and I know the
harm liberals do. We haven’t a liberal party any
more — liberalism’s infected all the other parties.
We arc all either liberal conservatives or liberal
socialists: we all have a good conscience. I’d rather
be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits, and
dies with it. Look at the history of Burma. We go
and invade the country: the local tribes support us:
we are victorious: but like you Americans # we
weren’t colonialists in those days. Oh no, we made
peace with the king and we handed him back his
province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn
in two. They were innocent. They thought we’d
stay. But we were liberals and we didn’t want a bad
conscience.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“We shall do the same thing here. Encourage
them and leave tb«-m with a little equipment and a
toy industry.”

“Toy industry?”

“Your plastic.”

“Oh yes, I see.”

“P don’t know what I’m talking politics for. They
don’t interest me and I’m a reporter. I’m not
engage."

“Aren’t you?” Pyle said.

“For the sake of an argument — to pass this bloody

121

B

night, that’s all. I don’t take sides. I’ll be still
reporting, whoever wins.”

N^If they win, you’ll be reporting lies.”

^There’s usually a way round, and I haven’t
noticed much regard for truth in our papers either.”

I tT'.nk the fact of our sitting there talking
encouraged the two soldiers: perhaps they thought
the sound of our white voices — for voices have a
colour too, yellow voices sing and black voices
gargle, while ours just speak — would give an impres-
sion of numbers and keep the Viets away. They
picked up their pans and began to cat again,
scraping with their chopsticks, eyes watching Pyle
and me over the rim of the pan.

“So you think we’ve lost?”

“That’s not the point,” I said. “I’ve no particular
desire to see you win. I’d like those two poor
buggers there to be happy — that’s all* I wish they
didn’t have to sit in the dark at night scared.”

“You have to fight for liberty.”

“I haven’t seen any Americans fighting around
here. And as for liberty, I don’t know what it
means. Ask them.” I called across the floor in
French to them. “La Libcrte — qu’est cc que e’est la
liberty?” They sucked in the rice and stared back
and said nothing.

Pyle said, “Do you want everybody to be made in
the same mould? You’re arguing for the sake of
arguing. You’re an intellectual. You stand for the
importance of the individual as much as I do —
or York.”

“Why have we only just discovered it?” I said.
“Forty years ago no one talked that way.”

“It wasn’t threatened then.”

“Ours wasn’t threatened, oh no, but who cared
about the individuality of the man in the padfry
field — and who does now? The only man to Jre at
him as a man is the political commissar. Hr 11 sit
in his hut and ask his name and listen to hw com-
plaints; he’ll give up an hour a day to teaching
him — it doesn’t matter what, he’s being treated like
a man, like someone of value. Don’t go on in the
East with that parrot cry about a threat to the
individual soul. Here you’d find yourself on the
wrong side — it’s they who stand for the individual
and we just stand for Private 23987, unit in the
global strategy.”

“You don’t mean half what you are s saying,”
Pyle said uneasily.

“Probably three quarters. I’ve been here a long
time. You know, it’s lucky I’m not engagi, there are
things I might be tempted to do — because here in
the East — well, I don’t like Ike. I like — well, these
two. This is their country. What’s the time? My
watch has stopped.”

“It’s turned eight-thirty.”

“Ten hours and T :c can move.”

“It’s going to be quite chilly,” Pyle said and
shivered. “1 never expected that.”

“There’s water all round. I’ve got a blanket in
the car. That will be enough.”

“I? it safe?”

“It’s early for the Viets.”

“Let me go.”

“I’m more used to the dark.”

When I stood up the two soldiers stopped eating.

123

I told them, “Je revicns, tout de suite.” I dangled
my legs over the trap door, found the ladder and
w<‘ nt down. It is odd how reassuring conversation is,
esp<Hally on abstract subjects: it seems to normalise
the s&angest surroundings. I was no longer scared :
it was'jis though I had left a room and would be
returning there to pick up the argument — the watch-
tower was the rue Catinat, the bar of the Majestic,
or even a room off Gordon Square.

I stood below the tower for a minute to get my
vision back. There was starlight, but no moonlight.
Moonlight reminds me of a mortuary and the cold
wash of an unshaded globe over a marble slab, but
starlight is alive and never still, it is almost as
ihcugh someone in those vast spaces is trying to
communicate a message of good will, for even the
names of the stars are friendly. Venus is any woman
we love, the Bears arc the bears of childhood, and I
suppose the Southern Crpss, to those, like my wife,
who believe, may be a favourite hymn or a prayer
beside tiny bed. Once I shivered as Pyle had done.
But the night was hot enough, only the shallow
stretch of water on either side gave a kind of icing
to the warmth. I started out towards the car, and
for a moment when I stood on the road I thought
it was no longer there. That shook my confidence,
even after I remembered that it had petered out
thirty yards away. I couldn’t help walking with my
shoulders bent: I felt more unobtrusive that way.

I had to unlock the boot to get the blanket and
the click and squeak startled me in the silence. I
didn’t relish being the only npise in what must have
been a night full of people. With the blanket over

124

my shoulder I lowered the boot more carefully than
I had raised it, and then, just as the catch caught,
the sky towards Saigon flared with light and me
sound of an explosion came rumbling downJlhc
road. A bren spat and spat and was quietJigain
before the rumbling stopped. I thought, ‘sbome-
body’s had it,” and very far away heard voices
crying with pain or fear or perhaps even triumph.
I don’t know why, but I had thought all the time
of an attack coming from behind, along the road
we had passed, and I had a moment’s sense of
unfairness that the Viet should be there ahead,
between us and Saigon. It was as though we had
been unconsciously driving towards danger instead
of away from it, just as I was now walking mils
direction, back towards the tower. I walked because
it was less noisy than to run, but my body wanted
to run.

At the foot of the ladder I called up to Pyle, “It’s
me — Fowler.” (Even then I couldn’t bring myself
to use my Christian name to him.) The scene inside
the hut had changed. The pans of rice were back
on the floor; one man held his rifle on his hip and
sat against the wall taring at Pyle and Pyle knelt a
little away out from the opposite wall with his eyes
on the sten gun which lay between him and the
second guard. It was as though he had begun to
crawl towards it but had been halted. The second
guards arm was extended towards the gun: no
one had fought or even threatened, it was like that
child’s game when you mustn’t be seen to move or
you are sent back to base to start again.

“What’s going on?” I said.

125

The two guards looked at me and Pyle pounced,
gulling the sten to his side of the room.

\'“Is it a game?” I asked.

\l don’t trust him with the gun,” Pyle said, “if
they^re coming.”

“E4fer used a stcn?”

“No.”

“That’s fine. Nor have I. I hope it’s loaded — we
wouldn’t know how to reload.”

The guards had quietly accepted the loss of the
gun. The one lowered his rifle and laid it across his
thighs; the other slumped against the wall and shut
his eyes as though like a child he believed himself
invisible in the dark. Perhaps he was glad to have
nr more responsibility. Somewhere far away the
bren started again — three bursts and then silence.
The second guard screwed his eyes closer shut.

“They don’t know we can’t use it, v Pyle said.

“They are supposed to be on our side.”

“I thought you didn’t have a side.”

“Touche,” I said. “I wish the Viets knew it.”

“What’s happening out there?”

I quoted again tomorrow’s Extreme-Orient’. “A
post fifty kilometres outside Saigon was attacked and
temporarily captured last night by Vietminh
irregulars.”

“Do you think it would be safer in the fields?”

“It would be terribly wet.”

“You don’t seem worried,” Pyle said.

“I’m scared stili— but things are better than they
might be. They don’t usually attack more than
three posts in a night. Our chances have improved.”

“What’s that?”

126

It was the sound of a heavy car coming up the
road, driving towards Saigon. I went to the rifle
slit and looked down, just as a tank went by.

“The patrol,” I said. The gun in the turret
shifted now to this side, now to that. I wanted to
call out to them, but what was the good?ifThey
hadn’t room on board for two useless civilians. The
earth floor shook a little as they passed, and they
had gone. I looked at my watch — eight fifty-one, and
waited, straining to read when the light flapped. It
was like judging the distance of lightning by the
delay before the thunder. It was nearly four minutes
before the gun opened up. Once I thought I detected
a bazooka replying, then all was quiet again.

“When they come back,” Pyle said, “we coqjld
signal them for a lift to the camp.”

An explosion set the floor shaking. “If they come
back,” I said. “That sounded like a mine.” When
I looked at my watch again it had passed nine fifteen
and the tank had not returned. There had been no
more firing.

I sat down beside Pyle and stretched out my legs.
“We’d better try to sleep,” I said. “There’s nothing
else we can do.”

“I’m not happy about the guards,” Pyle said.

“They are all right so long as the Viots don’t turn
up. Put the sten under your leg for safety.” I
closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself some-
where? else — sitting up in one of the fourth-class com-
partments the German railways ran before Hitler
came to power, in the days when one was young and
sat up all night without melancholy, when waking
dreams were full of hope and not of fear. This

127

was the hour when Phuong always set about pre-
paring my evening pipes. I wondered whether a
iVter was waiting for me — I hoped not, for I knew
wlrat a letter would contain, and so long as none
arrived I could day-dream of the impossible.

“Ate: you asleep?” Pyle asked.

“No.”

“Don’t you think we ought to pull up the ladder?”

“I begin to understand why they don’t. It’s the
only way out.”

“I wish that tank would come back.”

“It won’t now.”

I tried not to look at my watch except at long
intervals, and the intervals were never as long as
tlyjy had seemed. Nine forty, ten five, ten twelve,
ten thirty-two, ten forty-one.

“You awake?” I said to Pyle.

“Yes.”

“What arc you thinking about?”

He hesitated. “Phuong,” he said.

“Yes?” 1

“1 was just wondering what she was doing.”

“I can tell you that. She’ll have decided that I’m
spending the night at Tanyin — it won’t be the first
time. She’ll be lying on the bed with a joss stick
burning to keep away the mosquitoes and she’ll
be looking at the pictures in an old Paris-Match.
Like the French she has a passion for the Royal
Family.”

He said wistfully, “It must be wonderful to know
exactly,” and I could imagine his soft dog’s eyes in
the dark. They ought to have called him Fido, not
Aldcn.

128

“I don’t really know'— but it’s probably true.
There’s no good in being jealous when you can’t
anything about it. ‘No barricado for a belly.’ ”

“Sometimes I hate the way you talk, Thomas.
Do you know how she seems to me? — she seem*; fresh,
like a flower.”

“Poor flower,” I said. “There are a lot of weeds
around.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“She was dancing at the Grand Monde.”

“Dancing,” he exclaimed, as though the idea were
painful.

“It’s a pcifectly respectable profession,” I said.
“Don’t worry.”

“You have such an awful lot of c^cpcriegce.
Thomas.”

“I have an awful lot of years. When you reach
my age ...”

“I’ve never had a girl,” he said, “not properly.
Not what you’d call a real experience.”

“A lot of energy with your people seems to go into
whistling.”

“I’ve never told anybody else.”

“You’re young. It’s nothing to be ashamed oh”

“Have you had a lot of women, Fowler?”

“I don’t know what a lot means. Not more than
four women have had any importance to me — or me
to them. The other forty-odd — one wonders why one
does* it. A notion of hygiene, of one’s social obliga-
tions, both mistaken.”

“You think they are mistaken?”

“I wish I could have those nights back. I’m still
in love, Pyle, and I’m a wasting asset. Oh, and there

129

was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we
cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God
kntows why we should feel it, when we look around
and see who is wanted too.”

“You don’t think there’s anything wrong with me,
do youieThomas?”

“No, Pyle.”

“It doesn’t mean I don’t need it, Thomas, like
everybody else. I’m not — odd.”

“Not one of us needs it as much as we say. There’s
an awful lot of self-hypnosis around. Now I know I
need nobody — except Phuong. But that’s a thing
one learns with time. I could go a year without one
restless night if she wasn’t there.”

‘iBut she is there,” he said in a voice I could hardly
catch.

“One starts promiscuous and ends like one’s
grandfather, faithful to one woman.”

“I suppose it seems pretty naive to start that
way . . .”

“No.”

“It’s not in the Kinsey Report.”

“That’s why it’s not naive.”

“You know, Thomas, it’s pretty good being here,
talking to you like this. Somehow it doesn’t seem
dangerous any more.”

“We used to feel that in the blitz,” I said, “when
a lull came. But they always returned.”

“If somebody asked you what your deepest sexual
experience had been, what would you say?”

I knew the answer to that. “Lying in bed early
one morning and watching a woman in a red
dressing-gown brush her hair.”

130

“Joe said it was being in bed with a Chink and a
negress at the same time.”

“I’d have thought that one up too when I ^as
twenty.”

“Joe’s fifty.”

“1 wonder what mental age they gave hilt in the
war.”

“Was Phuong the girl in the red dressing-gown?”

I wished that he hadn’t asked that question.

“No,” I said, “that woman came earlier. When I
left my wife.”

“What happened?”

“1 left her, too.”

“Why?”

Why indeed? “We arc fools,” I said, “wher* we
love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw
her changing— I don’t know if she really was, but I
couldn’t bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran
towards the finish just like a coward runs towards
the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death
over.”

“Death?”

“It was a kind of death. Then I came cast.”

“And found Phuong?”

“Yes.”

“But don’t you find the same thing with Phuong?”

“Not the same. You sec. the other one loved me.
I was afraid of losing love. Now I’m only afraid of
losing Phuong.” Why had I said that, I wondered?
He didn’t need encouragement from me.

“But she loves you, doesn’t she?”

“Not like that. It isn’t in their nature. You’ll
find that out. It’s a cliche to call them children —

but there’s one thing wliich is childish. They love
you in return for kindness, security, the presents
ycm give them — they hate you for a blow or an
injustice. They don’t know what it’s like — just
walking into a room and loving a stranger. For an
aging tfian, Pyle, it’s very secure — she won’t run
away from home so long as the home is happy.”

I hadn’t meant to hurt him. I only realised I had
done it when he said with muffled anger, “She might
prefer a greater security or more kindness.”

“Perhaps.”

“Aren’t you afraid of that?”

“Not so much as I was of the other.”

“Do you love her at all?”

‘«Oh yes, Pyle, yes. But that other way I’ve only
loved once.”

“In spite of the forty-odd women,” he snapped
at me.

“I’m sure it’s below the Kinsey average. You
know, Pyle, women don’t want virgins. I’m not
sure we do* unless we are a pathological type.”

“I didn’t mean I w r as a virgin,” he said. All my
conversations with Pyle seemed to take grotesque
directions. Was it because of his sincerity that they
so ran off the customary rails? His conversation
never took the corners.

“You can have a hundred women and still be a
virgin, Pyle. Most of your G.I.s who were hanged
for rape in the war were virgins. We don’t have so
many in Europe. I’m glad. They do a lot of harm.”

“I just don’t understand you, Thomas.”

“It’s not worth explaining. I’m bored with the
subject anyway. I’ve reached the age when sex

■132

isn’t the problem so much as old age and death. I
wake up with these in mind and not a woman’s
body. I just don’t want to be alone in my last
decade, that’s all. I wouldn’t know what to think
about all day long. I’d sooner have a woman in the
same room — even one I didn’t love. But iftphuong
left me, would I have the energy to find another? . . .”

“If that’s all she means to you . . .”

“All, Pyle? Wait until you’re afraid of living ten
years alone with no companion and a nursing home
at the end of it. Then you’ll start running in any
direction, even away from that girl in the red
dressing-gown, to find someone, anyone, who will
last until you arc through.”

“Why don’t you go back to your wife, then?”

“It’s not easy to live with someone you’ve injured.”

A sten gun fired a long burst — it couldn’t have
been more than a mile away. Perhaps a nervous
sentry was shooting at shadows: perhaps another
attack had begun. I hoped it was an attack — it
increased our chances.

“Arc you scared, Thomas?”

“Of course I am. With all my instincts. But with
my reason I know it’s better to die like this. That’s
why I came cast. Death stays with you.” I looked
at my watch. It had gone eleven. An eight-hour
night and then we could relax. I said, “We seem to
have talked about pretty nearly everything except
Gocf. We’d better leave him to the small hours.”

“You don’t believe in Him, do you?”

“No.”

“Tilings to me wouldn’t make sense without Him.”

“They don’t make sense to me with him.”

*33

“I read a book once . .

„I never knew what book Pyle had read. (Pre-
stunably it wasn’t York Harding or Shakespeare or
the anthology of contemporary verse or The
Physiology of Marriage — perhaps it was The Triumph
of LifeJf: A voice came right into the tower with us,
it seemed to speak from the shadows by the trap —
a hollow megaphone voice saying something in
Vietnamese. “We’re for it,” I said. The two
guards listened, their faces turned to the rifle-slit,
their mouths hanging open.

“What is it?” Pyle said.

Walking to the embrasure was like walking through
the voice. I looked quickly out: there was nothing to
be *scen — I couldn’t even distinguish the road and
when I looked back into the room the rifle was
pointed, I wasn’t sure whether at me or at the slit.
But when I moved round the wall thc*riflc wavered,
hesitated, kept me covered: the voice went on saying
the same thing over again. I sat down and the rifle
was lowered.

“What’s he saying?” Pyle asked.

“I don’t know. I expect they’ve found the car
and are telling these chaps to hand us over or else.
Better pick up that sten before they make up their
minds.”

“He’ll shoot.”

“He’s not sure yet. When he is he’ll shoot any-
way.”

Pyle shifted his leg and the rifle came up.

“I’ll move along the wall,” I said. “When his
eyes waver get him covered.”

Just as I rose the voice stopped: the silence made

134

me jump. Pyle said sharply, “Drop your rifle.” I
had just time to wonder whether the sten w^s
unloaded — I hadn’t bothered to look — when me
man threw his rifle down.

I crossed the room and picked it up. Then the
voice began again — I had the impression 'ghat no
syllable had changed. Perhaps they used a record. I
wondered when the ultimatum would expire.

“What happens next?” Pyle asked, like a schoolboy
watching a demonstration in the laboratory: he
didn’t seem personally concerned.

“Perhaps a bazooka, perhaps a Viet.”

Pyle examined his sten. “There doesn’t seem any
mystery about this,” he said. “Shall I fire a burst?”

“No, let them hesitate. They’d rather take .the
post without firing and it gives us time. We’d better
clear out fast.”

“They may be waiting at the bottom.”

“Yes.”

The two men watched us — I write men, but I
doubt whether they had accumulated forty years
between them. “And these?” Pyle asked, and he
added with a shocking directness, “Shall I shoot
them?” Perhaps he wanted to try the sten.

“They’ve done nothing.”

“They were going to hand us over.”

“Why not?” I said. “We've no business here. It’s
their country.”

I \inloaded the rifle and laid it on the floor.
“Surely you’re not leaving that,” he said.

“I’m too old to run with a rifle. And this isn’t my
war. Come on.”

It wasn’t my war, but I wished those others in the

J 35

dark knew that as well. I blew the oil-lamp out and
dangled my legs over the trap, feeling for the ladder.
I could hear the guards whispering to each other
like crooners, in their language like a song. “Make
straight ahead,” I told Pyle, “aim for the rice.
Remenfber there’s water — 1 don’t know how deep.
Ready?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks for the company.”

“Always a pleasure,” Pyle said.

I heard the guards moving behind us: I wondered
if they had knives. The megaphone voice spoke
peremptorily as though offering a last chance.
Something shifted softly in the dark below us, but it
might have been a rat. I hesitated. “I wish to God
I had a drink,” I whispered.

“Let’s go.”

Something was coming up the ladder: I heard
nothing, but the ladder shook under my feet.

“What’s keeping you?” Pyle said.

I don’t know why I thought of it as something, that
silent stealthy approach. Only a man could climb
a ladder, and yet I couldn’t think of it as man like
myself— -it was as though an animal were moving
in to kill, very quietly and certainly with the remorse-
lessness of another kind of creation. The ladder
shook and shook and I imagined I saw its eyes
glaring upwards. Suddenly I could bear it no longer
and 1 jumped, and there was nothing there a‘t all
but the spongy' ground, which took my ankle and
twisted it :is a hand might have done. I could hear
Pyle coming down the ladder; I realised I had been
a frightened fool who could not recognise his own

136

trembling, and I had believed I was tough and
unimaginative, all that a truthful observer ^pd
reporter should be. I got on my feet and nearly
fell again with the pain. I started out for the field
dragging one foot after me and heard Pyle coming
behind me. Then the bazooka shell bursj on the
tower and I was on my face again.

(4)

“Are you hurt?” Pyle said.

“Something hit my leg. Nothing serious.”

“Let’s get on,” Pyle urged me. I could just see
him because he seemed to be covered with a fine
white dust. Then he simply went out like a piqjture
on the screen when the lamps of the projector fail:
only the sound-track continued. I got gingerly up
on to my good knee and tried to rise without putting
any weight on my bad left ankle, and then I was
down again breathless with pain. It wasn’t my
ankle: something had happened to my left leg. 1
couldn’t worry — pain took away care. I lay very
still on the ground hoping that pain wouldn’t find
me again: 1 even held my breath, as one does with
toothache. I didn’t think about the Victs who would
soon be searching the ruins of the tower: another
shell exploded on it — they were making quite sure
before they came in. What a lot of money it costs, I
thought as the pain receded, to kill a few human
beings — you can kill horses so much cheaper. I
can’t have been fully conscious, for I began to think
I had strayed into a knacker’s yard which was the
terror of my childhood in the small town where I

>37

was born. We used to think we heard the horses
whinnying with fear and the explosion of the
painless killer.

It was some while since the pain had returned,
now that I was lying still — and holding my breath,
that seqpied to me just as important. I wondered
quite lucidly whether .perhaps I ought to crawl
towards the fields. The Viet might not have time
to search far. Another patrol would be out by now
trying to contact the crew of the first tank. But I
was more afraid of the pain than of the partisans,
and I lay still. There was no sound anywhere of
Pyle: he must have reached the fields. Then I
heard someone weeping. It came from the direction
of flje tower, or what had been the tower. It wasn’t
like a man weeping: it was like a cliild who is
frightened of the dark and yet afraid to scream. I
supposed it was one of the two boys-*-perhaps his
companion had been killed. I hoped that the Viets
wouldn’t cut his throat. One shouldn’t fight a war
with children and a little curled body in a ditch
came back to mind. I shut my eyes — that helped
to keep the pain away, too, and waited. A voice
called something I didn’t understand. I almost felt
I could sleep in this darkness and loneliness and
absence of pain.

Then I heard Pyle whispering, “Thomas.
Thomas.” He had learnt footcralt quickly: I
had not heard him return.

“Go away,” I whispered back.

He found me there and lay down flat beside me.
“Why didn’t you come? Are you hurt?”

“My leg. I think it’s broken.”

138

“A bullet?”

“No, no. Log of wood. Stone. Something fr^m
the tower. It’s not bleeding.”

“You’ve got to make an effort.”

“Go away, Pyle. I don’t want to, it hurts too
much.”

“Which leg?”

“Left.”

He crept round to my side and hoisted my arm
over his shoulder. I wanted to whimper like the boy
in the tower and then I was angry, but it was hard
to express anger in a whisper. “God damn you,
Pyle, leave me alone. I want to stay.”

'“You can’t.”

He was pulling me half on to his shoulder and the
pain was intolerable. “Don’t be a bloody hero. I
don’t want to go.”

“You’ve got to help,” he said, “or we are both
caught.”

“You . . .”

“Be quiet or they’ll hear you.” I was crying with
vexation — you couldn’t use a stronger word. I
hoisted myself against him and let my left leg
dangle — we were like awkward contestants in a
three-legged race and we wouldn’t have stood a
chance if, at the moment we set off, a bren had not
begun to fire in quick short bursts somewhere down
the road towards the next tower: perhaps a patrol
was pushing up or perhaps they were completing
their score of three towers destroyed. It covered the
noise of our slow and clumsy flight,

I’m not sure whether I was conscious all the time:
I think for the last twenty yards Pyle must have

139

almost carried my weight. He said, “Careful here.

are going in.” The dry rice rustled around us
and the mud squelched and rose. The water was
up to our waists when Pyle stopped. He was panting
and a catch in his breath made him sound like a
bull-frog.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Couldn’t leave you,” Pyle said.

The first sensation was relief: the water and mud
held my leg tenderly and firmly like a bandage, but
soon the cold set us chattering. I wondered whether
it had passed midnight yet: we might have six hours
of this if the Viets didn’t find us.

“Can you shift your weight a little,” Pyle said,
“ju*t for a moment?” And my unreasoning irritation
came back — I had no excuse for it but the pain. I
hadn’t asked to be saved, or to have death so
painfully postponed. I thought wide nostalgia of
py couch on the hard dry ground. I stood like a
crane on one leg trying to relieve Pyle of my weight,
and when X moved, the stalks of rice tickled and cut
and crackled.

“You saved my life there,” I said, and Pyle
cleared his throat for the conventional response, “so
that I could die here! I prefer dry land.”

“Better not talk,” Pyle said as though to an
invalid. “Got to save our strength.”

“Who the hell asked you to save my life? I came
east to be killed. It’s like your damned imper-
tinence ...” I staggered in the mud and Pyle
hoisted my arm around his shoulder. “Ease it ofr,”
he said.

“You’ve been seeing war films. We aren’t a

140

couple of marines and you can’t win a war medal.”

“Sh sh.” Footsteps could be heard, coming do’jrn
to the edge of the field: the bren up the road stopped
firing and there was no sound except the footsteps
and the slight rustle of the rice when we breathed.
Then the footsteps halted: they only seeded the
length of a room away. I felt Pyle’s hand on my
good side pressing me slowly down; we sank together
into the mud very slowly so as to make the least
disturbance of the rice. On one knee, by straining
my head backwards, I could just keep my mouth
out of the water. The pain came back to my leg
and 1 thought, ‘If I faint here I drown’ — I had always
haled and fearod the thought of drowning. Why
can’t one choose one’s death? There was v no sound
now: perhaps twenty feet away they were waiting
for a rustle, a cough, a sneeze — ‘Oh God,’ I thought,
‘I’m going to sneeze.’ If only he had left me alone,
I would have been responsible only for my own life —
not his— and he wanted to live. I pressed my free
fingers against my upper lip in that trick we learn
when we are children playing at Hide and Seek, but
the sneeze lingered, waiting to burst, and silent in
the darkness the others waited for the sneeze. It
was coming, coming, came . . .

But in the very second that my sneeze broke, the
Viets opened with stem, drawing a line of fire
through the rice — it swallowed my sneeze with its
sharp drilling like a machine punching holes through
steel. I took a breath and went under — so instinc-
tively one avoids the loved thing, coquetting with
death, like a woman who demands to be raped by
her lover. The rice was lashed down over our heads

and the storm passed. We came up for air at the
s\me moment and heard the footsteps going away
back towards the tower.

“We’ve made it,” Pyle said, and even in my pain
I wondered what we’d made: for me, old age, an
editor’*, chair, loneliness; and as for him, one knows
now that he spoke prematurely. Then in the cold
we settled down to wait. Along the road to Tanyin
a bonfire burst into life: it burnt merrily like a cele-
bration.

“That’s my car,” I said.

Pyle said, “It’s a shame, Thomas. I hate to see
waste.”

“There must have been just enough petrol in the
tank to set it going. Are you as cold as I am, Pyle?”

“I couldn’t be colder.”

“Suppose we get out and lie flat on the road?”

“Let’s give them another half hour. v

“The weight’s on you.”

“I can stick it, I’m young.” He had meant the
claim humorously, but it struck as cold as the mud.
I had intended to apologise for the way my pain had
spoken, but now it spoke again. “You’re young all
right. You can afford to wait, can’t you?”

“I don’t get you, Thomas.”

We had spent what seemed to have been a week
of nights together, but he could no more under-
stand me than he could understand French. I said,
“You’d have done better to let me be.”

“I couldn’t have faced Phuong,” he said, and the
name lay there like a banker’s bid. I took it up.

“So it was for her,” I said. What made my
jealousy more absurd and humiliating was that it

142

had to be expressed in the lowest of whispers — it had
no tone, and jealousy likes histrionics. “You thipk
these heroics will get her. How wrong you are. If I
were deac L you could have had her.”

“I didwKmcan that,” Pyle said. “When you are
in love yap want to play the game, that’s all.”
That’s tn®, I thought, but not as he innocently
means it. pjfo be in love is to see yourself as someone
else sees $0u, it is to be in love with the falsified and
exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable
of honour — the courageous act is no more than
playing a part to an audience of two. Perhaps I was
no longer in Jove but I remembered.

“If it had been you, I’d have left you,” I said.

“Qh no, you wouldn’t, Thomas.” He added 'yith
unbearable complacency, “I know you better than
you/Jo yourself.” Angrily 1 tried to move away from
him and take my own weight, but the pain came
roaring back like a train in a tunnel and I leant
more heavily against him, before I began to sink
into the water. He got both his arms round me and
held me up, and then inch by inch he began to
edge me to the bank and the roadside. When he
got me there he lowered me flat in the shallow mud
below the bank at the edge of the field, and when the
pain retreated and I opened my eyes and ceased
to hold my breath, I could see only the elaborate
cypher of the constellations — a foreign cypher
which I couldn’t read: they were not the stars of
home. His face wheeled over me, blotting them out.
“I’m going down the road, Thomas, to find a
patrol.”

“Don’t be a fool,” I said. “They’ll shoot you

143

before they know who you are. If the Viets don’t
g*t you.”

“It’s the only chance. You can’t lie in the water
for six hours.”

“Then lay me in the road.” ^

“It’s*no good leaving you the sten?” he asked
doubtfully.

“Of course it’s not. If you are determined to be
a hero, at least go slowly through the rice.”

“The patrol would pass before I could signal it.”

“You don’t speak French.”

“1 shall call out c Je suis Frong^ais’. Don’t worry,
Thomas. I’ll be very careful.” Before I could reply
he was out of a whisper’s range — he was moving as
quvtly as he knew how, with frequent pauses. I
could see him in the light of the burning car, but no
shot came; soon he passed beyond the flames and
very soon the silence filled the footprints. Oh yes,
he was being careful as he had been careful boating
down the river into Phat Diem, with the caution of
a hero in r a boy’s adventure-story, proud of his
caution like a Scout’s badge and quite unaware of
the absurdity and the improbability of his adventure.

I lay and listened for the shots from the Viet or a
Legion patrol, but none came — it would probably
take him an hour or even more before he reached a
tower, if he ever reached it. I turned my head
enough to see what remained of our tower, a heap
of mud and bamboo and struts which seeme*d to
sink lower as the flames of the car sank. There was
peace when the pain went — a kind of Armistice Day
of the nerves: I wanted to sing. I thought how strange
it was that men of my profession would make only

144

two news-lines out of all this night — it was just a
common-or-garden night and I was the only straqge
thing about it. Then I heard a low crying begin
again from what was left of the tower. One of the
guards must still be alive.

I thought, ‘Poor devil, if we hadn’t broken down
outside his post, he could have surrendered as they
nearly all surrendered, or fled, at the first call
from the megaphone. But we were there — two white
men, and we had the sten and they didn’t dare to
move. When we left it was too late.’ I was respon-
sible for that voice crying in the dark: I had prided
myself on detachment, on not belonging to this war,
but those wounds had been inflicted by me just as
though I had used the sten, as Pyle had wanted t<j do.

I made an effort to get over the bank into the road.
I wanted to join him. It was the only thing I could
do, to share his pain. But my own personal pain
pushed me back. I couldn’t hear him any more. I
lay still and heard nothing but my own pain beating-
like a monstrous heart and held my breath and
prayed to the God I didn’t believe in, “Let me die or
faint. Let me die or faint”; and then I suppose I
fainted and was aware of nothing until I dreamed
that my eyelids had frozen together and someone was
inserting a chisel to prise them apart, and I wanted
to warn them not to damage the eyeballs beneath
but couldn’t speak and the chisel bit through and a
tor£h was shining on my face.

“We made it, Thomas,” Pyle said. 1 remember
that, but I don’t remember what Pyle later described
to others: that I waved my hand in the wrong
direction and told them there was a man in the

*45

tower and they had to see to him. Anyway I couldn’t
h%ve made the sentimental assumption that Pyle
made. I know myself, and I know the depth of my
selfishness. I cannot be at ease (and to be at ease
is my chief wish) if someone else is in pain, visibly or
audibly ,or tactually. Sometimes this is mistaken by
the innocent for unselfishness, when all I am doing
is sacrificing a small good — in this case postponement
in attending to my hurt — for the sake of a far greater
good, a peace of mind when I need think only of
myself.

They came back to tell me the boy was dead, and
I was happy — I didn’t even have to suffer much
pain after the hypodermic of morphia had bitten
my leg.

CHAPTER III

(0

I came slowly up the stairs to the Hat in the rue
Catinat, pausing and resting on the first landing.
The old women gossiped as they had always done,
squatting on the floor outside the urinoir, carrying
Fate in the lines of their faces as others on the palm.
They were silent as I passed and I woncjered what
they might have told me, if I had known their
language, of what had passed while I had been away
in the Legion Hospital back on the road towards
Tanyin. Somewhere in the tower and the fields I
had lost my keys, but I had sent a message to
Phuong which she must have received, if she was
still there. That ‘if’ was the measure of my uncer-
tainty. I had had no news of her in the hospital,
but she wrote French with difficulty, and I couldn’t
read Vietnamese. I knocked on the door and it
opened immediately and everything seemed to be
the same. I watched her c'osely while she asked how
I was and touched my splinted leg and gave me
her shoulder to lean on, as though one could lean
with safety on so young a plant. 1 said, “I’m glad to
be home.”

She told me that she had missed me, which of
course was what I wanted to hear: she always told

147

me what I wanted to hear, like a coolie answering
questions, unless by accident. Now I awaited the
accident.

“How have you amused yourself?” I asked.

“Oh, I have seen my sister often. She has found
a post with the Americans.”

“She has, has she? Did Pyle help?”

“Not Pyle, Joe.”

“Who’s Joe?”

“You know him. The Economic Attache.”

“Oh, of course, Joe.”

He was a man one always forgot. To this day 1
cannot describe him, except his fatness and his
powdered clean-shaven cheeks and his big laugh;
all his identity escapes me — except that he was called
Joe. There are some men whose names are always
shortened.

With Phuong’s help I stretched myself on the
bed. “Seen any movies?” I asked.

“There is a very funny one at the Catinat,” and
immediately' she began to tell me the plot in great
detail, while I looked around the room for the white
envelope that might be a telegram. So long as 1
didn’t ask, I could believe that she had forgotten
to tell me, and it might be there on the table by the
typewriter, or on the wardrobe, perhaps put for
safety in the cupboard drawer where she kept her
collection of scarves.

“The postmaster — I think he was the postmaster,
but he may have been the mayor — followed them
home, and he borrowed a ladder from the baker
and he climbed through Gorrine’s window, but, you
see, she had gone into the next room with Francois,

148

but he did not hear Mmc. Bompicrre coming and
she came in and saw him at the top of the laddar
and thought . .

“Who was Mine. Bompierre?” I asked, turning
my head to see the wash-basin, where sometimes she
propped reminders among the lotions.

“I told you. She was Corrine’s mother and she
was looking for a husband because she was a
widow . .

She sat on the bed and put her hand inside my
shirt. “It was very funny,” she said.

“Kiss me, Phuong.” She had no coquetry. She
did at once what I asked and she went on with the
story of the film. Just so she would have made love
if I had asked her to, straight away, peeling olF her
trousers without question, and afterwards have
taken up the thread of Mmc. Bompierre’s story and
the postmaster’s predicament.

“Has a call come for me?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you give it me?”

“It is too soon for you to work. You must lie
down and rest.”

“This may not b' work.”

She gave it me and I saw that it had been opened.
It read: “Four hundred words background wanted
effect de Lattrc’s departure on military and political
situation.”

“"tfes,” I said. “It is work. How did you know?
Why did you open it?”

“I thought it was from your wife. 1 hoped that it
was good news.”

“Who translated it for you

*49

“I took it to my sister.”

“If it had been bad news would you have left me,
Phuong?”

She rubbed her hand across my chest to reassure
me, not realising that it was words this time I
required, however untrue. “Would you like a pipe?
There is a letter for yt#i. I think perhaps it is from
her.” .

“Did you open that too?”

“I don’t open your letters. Telegrams are public.
The clerks read them.”

This envelope was among the scarves. She took
it gingerly out and laid it on the bed. I recognised
the handwriting. “If this is bad news what will
yo*i . . . ?” I knew well that it could be nothing
else but bad. A telegram might have meant a
sudden act of generosity: a letter could only mean
explanation, justification ... so I broke off my
question, for there was no honesty in asking for the
kind of promise no one can keep.

“What acre you afraid of?” Phuong asked, and I
thought, ‘I’m afraid of the loneliness, of the Press
Club and the bed-sitting-room, I’m afraid of Pyle.’

“Make me a brandy and soda,” I said. I looked
at the beginning of the letter, “Dear Thomas,” and
the end, “Affectionately, Helen,” and waited for the
brandy.

“It is from her?”

“Yes.” Before I read it I began to wonder
whether at the end I should lie or tell the truth to
Phuong.

150

“Dear Thomas,

“I was not surprised to get your letter and t»
know that you were not alone. You are not a
man, are you? to remain alone for very long.
You pick up women like your coat picks up
dust. Perhaps I would feel more sympathy with
your case if I didn’t feel that you would find
consolation very easily when you return to
London. I don’t suppose you’ll believe me, but
what gives me pause and prevents me cabling
you a simple No is the thought of the poor girl.
We are apt to be more involved than you are.”

I had a drink of brandy. I hadn’t realised how
open the sexual wounds remain over the ^years., I
had carelessly — not choosing my words with skill —
set hers bleeding again. Who could blame her for
seeking my own scars in return? When we are
unhappy we hurt.

“Is it bad?” Phuong asked.

“A bit hard,” I said. “But she has the right . . .”
I read on.

“I always believed you loved Anne more
than the rest of us until you packed up and went.
Now you seem to be planning to leave another
woman because I can tell from your letter that
you don’t really expect a ‘favourable’ reply.
‘I’ll have done my best’ — aren’t you thinking
that? What would you do if I cabled ‘Yes’?
Would you actually marry her? (I have to
write ‘her’ — you don’t tell me her name.)
Perhaps you would. I suppose like the rest

1 5 1

of us you are getting old and don’t like living
alone. I feel very lonely myself sometimes. I
gather Anne has found another companion.
But you left her in time.”

She had found the dried scab accurately. I drank
again. An issue of blood — the phrase came into my
mind.

“Let me make you a pipe,” Phuong said.

“Anything,” I said, “anything.”

“That is one reason why I ought to say No.
(We don’t need to talk about the religious
reason, because you’ve never understood or
believed in that.) Marriage doesn’t prevent you
leaving a woman, docs it? It only delays the
process, and it would be all the more unfair
to the girl in this case if you livffd with her as
long as you lived with me. You would bring
her back to England where she would be lost
and a stranger, and when you left her, how
terribly abandoned she would feel. J don’t
suppose she even uses a knife and fork, does she?
I’m being harsh because I’m thinking of her
good more than I am of yours. But, Thomas
dear, I do think of yours too.”

I felt physically sick. It was a long time since I
had received a letter from my wife. I had forced her
to write it and I could feci her pain in every line.
Her pain struck at my pain: we were back at the old
routine of hurting each other. If only it were possible
to love without injury — fidelity isn’t enough: I had

152

been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her.
The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too smaB
in mind and body to possess another person without
pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a
way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me
again — I had forgotten her pain for too long, qfid this
was the only kind of recompense I could give her.
Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in
any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some
voice crying from a tower.

Phuong lit the opium lamp. “Will she let you
marry me?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Doesn’t she say?”

“If she does, she says it very slowly.”

I thought, ‘How much you pride yourself on being
degagi , the reporter, not the leader-writer, and what
a mess you make behind the scenes.' The other kind
of war is more innocent than this. One does less
damage with a mortar.’

“If I go against my deepest conviction and
say ‘Yes’, would it even be good for you? You
say you are being recalled to England and I can
realise how you will hate that and do anything
to make it easier. I can see you marrying after a
drink too many. The first time we really tried —
ypu as well as me — and we failed. One doesn’t
try so hard the second time. You say it will be
the end of life to lose this girl. Once you used
exactly that phrase to me — I could show you the
letter, I have it still — and I suppose you wrote
in the same way to Anne. You say that we’ve

153

F

always tried to tell the truth to each other, but,
Thomas, your truth is always so temporary.
What’s the good of arguing with you, or trying
to make you see reason? It’s easier to act as my
faith tells me to act — as you think unreasonably
— and simply to write: I don’t believe in divorce:
my religion forbids it, and so the answer,
Thomas, is no — no.”

There was another half page, which I didn’t read,
before “Affectionately, Helen”. I think it contained
news of the weather and an old aunt of mine I loved.

I had no cause for complaint, and I had expected
this reply. There was a lot of truth in it. I only
wished that she had not thought aloud at quite such
length, when the thoughts hurt her as well as me.

“She says ‘No’?”

I said with hardly any hesitation, “She hasn’t
made up her mind. There’s still hope.”

Phuong laughed. “You say ‘hope’ with such a
long face.” She lay at my feet like a dog on a
crusader’s tomb, preparing the opium, and I won-
dered what I should say to Pyle. When I had
smoked four pipes I felt more ready for the future
and I told her the hope was a good one — my wife
was consulting a lawyer. Any day now I would get
the telegram of release.

“It would not matter so much. You could rqake a
settlement,” she said, and I could hear her sister’s
voice speaking through her mouth.

“I have no savings,” I said. “I can’t outbid
Pyle.”

“Don’t worry. Something may happen. There

*54

are always ways,” she said. “My sister says you
could take out a life-insurance,” and I thought how
realistic it was of her not to minimise the importance
of money and not to make any great and binding
declarations of love. I wondered how Pyle over the
years would stand that hard core, for Pyle # was a
romantic; but then of course in his case there would
be a good settlement, the hardness might soften like
an unused muscle when the need for it vanished.
The rich had it both ways.

That evening, before the shops had closed in the
rue Catinat, Phuong bought three more silk scarves.
She sat on the bed and displayed them to me,
exclaiming at the bright colours, filling a void with
her singing voice, and then folding them^carefijly
she laid them with a dozen others in her drawer: it
was as though she were laying the foundation of a
modest settlement. And I laid the crazy foundation
of mine, writing a letter that very night to Pyle
with the unreliable clarity and foresight of opium.
This was what I wrote — I found it again the other
day tucked into York Harding’s R6le of the West. He
must have been reading the book when my letter
arrived. Perhaps he had used it as a bookmark and
then not gone on reading.

‘‘Dear Pyle,” I wrote, and was tempted for the
only time to write, “Dear Alden,” for, after all, this
was a bread-and-butter letter of some importance
and *it differed little from other bread-and-butter
letters in containing a falsehood:

“Dear Pyle, I have been meaning to write from
the hospital to say thank you for the other night.
You certainly saved me from an uncomfortable end.

155

I’m moving about again now with the help of a stick
—I broke apparently in just the right place and age
hasn’t yet reached my bones and made them brittle.
We must have a party together some time to cele-
brate.” (My pen sttick on that word, and then, like
an an£ meeting an obstacle, went round it by
another route.) “I’ve got something else to celebrate
and I know you witPbe glad of this, too, for you’ve
always said that Phuong’s interests were what we
both wanted. I found a letter from my wife waiting
when I got back, and she’s more or less agreed to
divorce me. So you don’t need to worry any more
about Phuong” — it was a cruel phrase, but I didn’t
realise the cruelty until I read the letter over and
tl\en it was too late to alter. If I were going to scratch
that out, I had better tear the whole letter up.

“Which scarf do you like best?” Phuong asked.
“I love the yellow.”

“Yes. The yellow. Go down to the hotel and post
this letter for me.”

She looked at the address. “I could take it to the
Legation. It would save a stamp.”

“I would rather you posted it.”

Then I lay back and in the relaxation of the opium
I thought, ‘At least she won’t leave me now before
I go, and perhaps, somehow, tomorrow, after a few
more pipes, I shall think of a way to remain.’

( 2 )

Ordinary life goes on — that has saved many a
man’s reason. Just as in an air-raid it proved impos-
sible to be frightened all the time, so under the

1.56

bombardment of routine jobs, of chance encounters,
of impersonal anxieties, one lost for hours together*
the personal fear. The thoughts of the coming April,
of leaving Indo-China, of the hazy future without
Phuong, were affected by the day’s telegrams, the
bulletins of the Vietnam Press, and Jby the illness of
my assistant, an Indian called Dominguez (his
family had come from Goa by way of Bombay) who
had attended in my place the less important Press
Conferences, kept a sensitive ear open to the tones
of gossip and rumour, and took my messages to the
cable-offices and the censorship. With the help of
Indian traders, particularly in the north, in Haiph-
ong, Nam Dinh and Hanoi, he ran his own personal
intelligence sendee for my benefit, and I think Ije
knew more accurately than the French High Com-
mand the location of Vietminh battalions within
the Tonkin delta.

And because w’e never used our information
except when it became news, and never passed any
reports to the French Intelligence, he had the trust
and the friendship of several Vietminh agents
hidden in Saigon-Cholon. The fact that he was an
Asiatic, in spite of his name, unquestionably helped.

I was fond of Dominguez: where other men carry
their pride like a skin-disease on the surface, sensitive
to the least touch, his pride was deeply hidden and
reduced to the smallest proportion possible, I think,
for any human being. AH that you encountered in
daily contact with him was gentleness and humility
and an absolute love of truth: you would have had
to be married to him to discover the pride. Perhaps
truth and humility go together; so many lies come

157

from our pride — in my profession a reporter’s pride,

• the desire to file a better story than the .other man’s,
and it was Dominguez who helped me not to care —
to withstand all those telegrams from home asking
why I had not covered so and so’s story or the report
of someone else which I knew to be untrue.

Now that he was ill I realised how much I owed
him — why, he would even see that my car was full
of petrol, and yet never once, with a phrase or a
look, had he encroached on my private life. I
believe he was a Roman Catholic, but I had no
evidence for it beyond his name and the place of his
origin— for all I knew from his conversation, he
might have worshipped Krishna or gone on annual
pilgrimages, pricked by a wire frame, to the
Batu Caves. Now his illness came like a mercy,
reprieving me from the treadmill of private anxiety.
It was I now who had to attend the wearisome Press
Conferences and hobble to my table at the Con-
tinental for a gossip with my colleagues; but I was
less capable than Dominguez of telling truth from
falsehood, and so I formed the habit of calling in on
him in the evenings to discuss what I had heard.
Sometimes one of his Indian friends was there,
sitting beside the narrow iron bed in the lodgings
Dominguez shared in one of the meaner streets off
the Boulevard Gallieni. He would sit up straight in
his bed with his feet tucked under him so that you
had less the impression of visiting a sick man tnan of
being received by a rajah or a priest. Sometimes
when his fever was bad his face ran with sweat, but
he never lost the clarity of his thought. It was as
though his illness were happening to another

158

person’s body. His landlady kept a jug of fresh limg
by his side, but I never saw him take a drink — per-
haps that would have been to admit that it was his
own thirst, and his own body which suffered.

Of all the days just then that I visited him one I
remember in particular. I had given up« asking
him how he was for fear that the question sounded
like a reproach, and it was always he who inquired
with great anxiety about my health and apologised
for the stairs 1 had to climb. Then he said, “I would
like you to meet a friend of mine. He has a story
you should listen to.”

“Yes?”

“I have his name written down because I know
you find it difficult to remember Chinese namf'S.
We must not use it, of course. He has a warehouse
on the Quai Mytho for junk metal.”

“Important?”

“It might be.”

“Can you give me an idea?”

“I would rather you heard from him. There is
something strange, but I don’t understand it.” The
sweat was pouring down his face, but he just let it
run as though the drops were alive and sacred—
there was that much of the Hindu in him, he
would never have cndangeied the life of a fly. He
said, “How much do you know of your friend Pyle?”
* “Not very much. Our tracks cross, that’s all. I
haven’t seen him since Tanyin.”

“What job docs he do?”

“Economic Mission, but that covers a multitude of
sins. I think he’s interested in home-industries —
I suppose with an American business tie-up. I don’t

159

Jike the way they keep the French fighting and cut
out their business at the same time.”

“I heard him talking the other day at a party the
Legation was giving to visiting Congressmen. They
had put him on to brief them.”

“Goll help Congress,” I said, “he hasn’t been in
the country six months.”

“He was talking about the old colonial powers —
England and France, and how you two couldn’t
expect to win the confidence of the Asiatics. That
was where America came in now with clean hands.”

“Honolulu, Puerto Rico,” I said, “New Mexico.”

“Then someone asked him some stock question
about the chances of the Government here ever
beating the Vietminh and he said a Third Force could
do it. There was always a Third Force to be found
free from Communism and the taint of colonialism —
national democracy he called it; you only had to
find a leader and keep him safe from the old colonial
powers.”

“It’s all in York Harding,” I said. “He had read
it before he came out here. He talked about it his
first week and he’s learned nothing.”

“He may have found his leader,” Dominguez
said.

“Would it matter?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what he does. But
go and talk to my friend on the Quai Mytho.” «

I went home to leave a note for Phuong in the
rue Catinat and then drove down past the port as
the sun set. The tables and chairs were out on the
quai beside the steamers and the grey naval boats,
and the little portable kitchens burned and bubbled.

160

In the Boulevard de la Somme the hairdressers wer^
busy under the trees and the fortune-tellers squatted
against the walls with their soiled packs of cards. In
Cholon you were in a different city where work
seemed to be just beginning rather than petering
out with the daylight. It was like driving*into a
pantomime set: the long vertical Chinese signs and
the bright lights and the crowd of extras led you
into the wings, where everything was suddenly so
much darker and quieter. One such wing took me
down again to the quai and a huddle of sampans,
where the warehouses yawned in the shadow and no
one was about.

I found the place with difficulty and almost by
accident, the godown gates were open, and I covRd
see the strange Picasso shapes of the junk pile by
the light of an old lamp: bedsteads, bathtubs, ash
pans, the bonnets of cars, stripes of old colour
where the light hit. I walked down a narrow track
carved in the iron quarry and called out for Mr.
Chou, but there was no reply. At the end of the
godown a stair led up to what I supposed might be
Mr. Chou’s house — I had apparently been directed
to the back door, and I supposed that Dominguez
had his reasons. Even the staircase was lined with
junk, pieces of scrap-iron which might come in
useful one day in this jackdaw’s nest of a house.
There was one big room on the landing and a whole
family sat and lay about in it with the effect of a
camp which might be struck at any moment: small
tea-cups stood about everywhere and there were lots
of cardboard boxes full of unidentifiable objects and
fibre suitcases ready strapped: there was an old

161

Jady sitting on a big bed, two boys and two girls, a
baby crawling on the floor, three middle-aged
women in old brown peasant trousers and jackets
and two old men in a comer in blue silk mandarin
coats playing mah jongg — they paid no attention to
my coining: they played rapidly, identifying each
piece by touch, and the noise was like shingle
turning on a beach after a wave withdraws. No one
paid any more attention than they did; only a cat
leapt on to a cardboard box and a lean dog sniffed
at me and withdrew.

“M. Chou?” I asked, and two of the women
shook their heads, and still no one regarded me,
except that one of the women rinsed out a cup and
p6ured tea from a pot which had been resting warm
in its silk-lined box. I sat down on the end of the
bed next the old lady and a girl brought me the cup:
it was as though I had been absorbed into the com-
munity with the cat and the dog — perhaps they had
turned up the first time as fortuitously as I had.
The baby crawled across the floor and pulled at my
laces and no one reproved it: one didn’t in the East
reprove children. Three commercial calendars
were hanging on the walls, each with a girl in gay
Chinese costume with bright pink cheeks. There
was a big mirror mysteriously lettered Cafe de la
Paix — perhaps it had got caught up accidentally in
the junk: I felt caught up in it myself.

I drank slowly the green bitter tea, shifting the
handleless cup from palm to palm as the heat
scorched my fingers, and I wondered how long I
ought to stay. I tried the family once in French,
asking when they expected M. Chou to return, but

162

no one replied: they had probably not understood.
When my cup was empty they refilled it and con-
tinued their own occupations: a woman ironing, a
girl sewing, the two boys at their lessons, the old
lady looking at her feet, the tiny crippled feet of old
China — and the dog watching the cat, which stayed
on the cardboard boxes.

I began to realise how hard Dominguez worked
for his lean living.

A Chinese of extreme emaciation came into the
room: he seemed to take up no room at all: he was
like the piece of greaseproof paper that divides the
biscuits in a tin. The only thickness he had was
in his striped flannel pyjamas. “M. Chou?” I
asked.

He looked at me with the indifferent gaze of a
smoker: the sunken cheeks, the baby wrists, the arms
of a small girl — many years and many pipes had
been needed to whittle him down to these dimensions.
I said, “My friend, M. Dominguez, said that you had
something to show me. You are M. Chou?”

Oh yes, he said, he was M. Chou and waved me
courteously back to my seat. I could tell that the
object of my coming had been lost somewhere
within the smoky corridors of his skull. I would
have a cup of tea? he was much honoured by my
visit. Another cup was riused on to the floor and
put like a live coal into my hands— the ordeal by
tea.* I commented on the size of his family.

He looked round with faint surprise as though he
had never seen it in that light before. “My mother,”
he said, “my wife, my sister, my uncle, my brother,
my children, my aunt’s children.” The baby had

163

rolled away from my feet and lay on its back kicking
and crowing. I wondered to whom it belonged.
No one seemed young enough — or old enough — to
have produced that.

I said, “M. Dominguez told me it was important.”

“Ah, M. Dominguez. I hope M. Dominguez is
well?”

“He has had a fever.”

“It is an unhealthy time of year.” I wasn’t
convinced that he even remembered who Dominguez
was. He began to cough, and under his pyjama
jacket, which had lost two buttons, the tight skin
twanged like a native drum.

“You should see a doctor yourself,” I said. A
nejvcomer joined us — I hadn’t heard him enter. He
was a young man neatly dressed in European clothes.
He said in English, “Mr. Chou has only one lung.”

“I am very sorry . .

“He smokes one hundred and fifty pipes every
day.”

“That sounds a lot.”

“The doctor says it will do him no good, but Mr.
Chou feels much happier when he smokes.”

I made an understanding grunt.

“If I may introduce myself, I am Mr. Chou’s
manager.”

“My name is Fowler. Mr. Dominguez sent me.
He said that Mr. Chou had something to tell me.”

“Mr. Chou’s memory is very much impaired. * Will
you have a cup of tea?”

“Thank you, I have had three cups already.” It
sounded like a question and an answer in a phrase-
book.

164

Mr. Chou’s manager took the cup out of my hand
and held it out to one of the girls, who after spillir^
the dregs on the floor again refilled it.

“That is not strong enough,” he said, and took
it and tasted it himself, carefully rinsed it and refilled
it from a second teapot. “That is better?” he asked.

“Much better.”

Mr. Chou cleared his throat, but it was only for an
immense expectoration into a tin spittoon decorated
with pink blooms. The baby rolled up and down
among the tea-dregs and the cat leapt from a card-
board box on to a suitcase.

“Perhaps it would be better if you talked to me,”
the young man said. “My name is Mr. Hcng.”

“If you would tell me ...”

“Wc will go down to the warehouse,” Mr. Heng
said. “It is quieter there.”

I put out my hand to Mr. Chou, who allowed it to
rest between his palms with a look of bewilderment,
then gazed around the crowded room as though he
were trying to fit me in. The sound of the turning
shingle receded as wc went down the stairs. Mr.
Heng said, “Be careful. The last step is missing,”
and he flashed a t r -ch to guide me.

We were back among the bedsteads and the bath-
tubs, and Mr. Heng led the way down a side aisle.
When he had. gone about twenty paces he stopped
and shone his light on to a small iron drum. He said,
“Do* you see that?”

“What about it?”

He turned it over and showed the trade mark:
‘Diolacton.’

“It still means nothing to me.”

165

He said, “I had two of those drums here. They
f/ere picked up with other junk at the garage of
Mr. Phan-Van-Muoi. You know him?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“His wife is a relation of General Th£.”

“I still don’t quite see . . . ?”

“Do you know what this is?” Mr. Heng asked,
stooping and lifting a long concave object like a stick
of celery which glistened chromium in the light of his
torch.

“It might be a bath-fixture.”

“It is a mould,” Mr. Heng said. He was obviously
a man who took a tiresome pleasure in giving
instruction. He paused for me to show my ignorance
ag«un. “You understand what I mean by a mould?”

“Oh yes, of course, but I still don’t follow . . .”

“This mould was made in U.S.A. Diolacton is
an American trade name. You begin to under-
stand?”

“Frankly, no.”

“There is a flaw in the mould. That was why it
was thrown away. But it should not have been
thrown away with the junk — nor the drum either.
That was a mistake. Mr. Muoi’s manager came here
personally. I could not find the mould, but I let
him have back the other drum. I said it was all I
had, and he told me he needed them for storing
chemicals. Of course, he did not ask for the mould —
that would have given too much away — but he had
a good search. Mr. Muoi himself called later at the
American Legation and asked for Mr. Pyle.”

“You seem to have quite an Intelligence Service,”
I said. I still couldn’t imagine what it was all about.

1 66

“I asked Mr. Chou to get in touch with Mr.
Dominguez.”

“You mean you’ve established a kind of connec-
tion between Pyle and the General,” I said. “A very
slender one. It’s not news anyway. Everybody here
goes in for Intelligence.”

Mr. Heng beat his heel against the black iron
drum and the sound reverberated among the bed-
steads. He said, “Mr. Fowler, you are English. You
are neutral. You have been fair to all of us. You can
sympathise if some of us feel strongly on whatever
side.”

I said, “If you are hinting that you are a Com-
munist, or a Vietminh, don’t worry. I’m not
shocked. I have no politics.”

“If anything unpleasant happens here in Saigon,
it will be blamed on us. My Committee would like
you to take a fair view. That is why I have shown
you this and this.”

“What is Diolacton?” I said. “It sounds like
condensed milk.”

“It has something in common with milk.” Mr.
Heng shone his torch inside the drum. A little white
powder lay like du^t on the bottom. “It is one of the
American plastics,” he said.

“I heard a rumour that Pyle was importing
plastics for toys.” I picked up the mould and looked
at it I tried in my mind to divine its shape. This
was not how the object itself would look: this was the
image in a mirror, reversed.

“Not for toys,” Mr. Heng said.

“It is like parts of a rod.”

“The shape is unusual.”

167

“I can’t see what it could be for.”
v Mr. Heng turned away. “I only want you to
remember what you have seen,” he said, walking
back in the shadows of the junk pile. “Perhaps one
day you will have a reason for writing about it.
But you, must not say you saw the drum here.”

“Nor the mould?” I asked.

“Particularly not the mould.”

( 3 )

It is not easy the first time to meet again one who
has saved — as they put it — one’s life. I had not seen
Pyle while I was in the Legion Hospital, and his
absence and silence, easily accountable (for he was
more sensitive to embarrassment than I), sometimes
worried me unreasonably, so that at night before
my sleeping drug had soothed me I would imagine
him going up my stairs, knocking at my door,
sleeping in my bed. I had been unjust to him in that,
and so I had added a sense of guilt to my other more
formal obligation. And then I suppose there was
also the guilt of my letter. (What distant ancestors
had given me this stupid conscience? Surely they
were free of it when they raped and killed in their
palaeolithic world.)

Should I invite my saviour to dinner, I sometimes
wondered, or should I suggest a meeting for a drink
in the bar of the Continental? It was an unusual
social problem, perhaps depending on the value one
attributed to one’s life. A meal and a bottle of wine
or a double whisky? — it had worried me for some
days until the problem was solved by Pyle himself*,

1 68

who came and shouted at me through my closejl
door. I was sleeping through the hot afternoon,
exhausted by the morning’s effort to use my leg,
and I hadn’t heard his knock.

“Thomas, Thomas.” The call dropped into a
dream I was having of walking down a long empty
road looking for a turning which never came. The
road unwound like a tape-machine with a uni-
formity that would never have altered if the voice
hadn’t broken in — first of all like a voice crying in
pain from a tower and then suddenly a voice
speaking to me personally, “Thomas, Thomas.”

Under my breath I said, “Go away, Pyle. Don’t
come near me. I don’t want to be saved.”

“Thomas.” He was hitting at my dobr, but I
lay possum as though I were back in the rice field
and he was an enemy. Suddenly -I realised that the
knocking had stopped, someone was speaking in a
low voice outside and someone was replying.
Whispers are dangerous. I couldn’t tell who the
speakers were. I got carefully off the bed and with
the help of my stick reached the door of the other
room. Perhaps I had moved too unhurriedly and
they had heard me, because a silence grew outside.
Silence like a plant put out tendrils: it seemed to
grow under the door and spread its leaves in the
room where I stood. It was a silence I didn’t like,
and* I tore it apart by flinging the door open.
Phuong stood in the passage and Pyle had his hands
on her shoulders: from their attitude they might
have parted from a kiss.

“Why, come in,” I said, “enme in.”

“I couldn’t make you hear,” Pyle said.

“I was asleep at first, and then I didn’t want to be
disturbed. But I am disturbed, so come in.” I said
in French to Phuong, “Where did you pick him up?”

“Here. In the passage,” she said. “I heard him
knocking, so I ran upstairs to let him in.”

“Sit down,” I said to Pyle. “Will you have some
coffee?”

"No, and I don’t want to sit down, Thomas.”

“I must. This leg gets tired. You got my letter?”

“Yes. I wish you hadn’t written it.”

“Why?”

“Because it was a pack of lies. I trusted you,
Thomas.”

“Y ou s houldn’t trust anyone when there’s a
weftnan in the ca3ffr* *'~ ~ ™

r *" n Then you needn’t trust me after this. I’ll come
sneaking up here when you go out, I’ll write letters
in typewritten envelopes. Maybe I’m growing up,
Thomas.” But there were tears in his voice, and he
looked younger than he had ever done. “Couldn’t
you have Won without lying?”

“No. This is European duplicity, Pyle. We have
to make up for our lack of supplies. I must have been
clumsy though. How did you spot the lies?”

“It was her sister,” he said. “She’s working for
Joe now. I saw her just now. She knows you’ve
been called home.”

“Oh, that,” I said with relief. “Phuong k^ows
it too.”

“And the letter from your wife? Does Phuong
know about that? Her sister’s seen it.”

“How?”

“She came here to meet Phuong when you were

170

out yesterday and Phuong showed it to her. You
can’t deceive her. She reads English.”

“I see.” There wasn’t any point in being angry
with anyone — the offender was too obviously myself,
and Phuong had probably only shown the letter as a
kind of boast — it wasn’t a sign of mistrust.

“You knew all this last night?” I asked Pfiuong.

“Yes.”

“I noticed you were quiet.” I touched her arm.
“What a fury you might have been, but you’re
Phuong — you are no fury.”

“I had to think,” she said, and I remembered how
waking in the night I had told from the irregularity
of her breathing that she was not asleep. I’d put my
arm out to her and asked her “Le cauchemar?” $he
used to suffer from nightmares when she first came
to the rue Catinat, but last night she had shaken
her head at the suggestion: her back was turned to
me and I had moved my leg against her — the first
move in the formula of intercourse. I had noticed
nothing wrong even then.

“Can’t you explain, Thomas, why . . .”

“Surely it’s obvious enough. I wanted to keep
her.”

“At any cost to her?”

“Of course.”

“That’s not love.”

“Perhaps it’s not your way of love, Pyle.”

“I want to protect her.”

“I don’t. She doesn’t need protection. I want her
around, I want her in my bed.”

“Against her will?”

“She wouldn’t stay against her will, Pyle.”

171

“She can’t love you after this.” His ideas were as
simple as that. I turned to look for her. She had
gone through to the bedroom and was pulling the
counterpane straight where I had lain: then she
took one of her picture books from a shelf and sat
on the bed as though she were quite unconcerned
with our talk. I could tell what book it was — a
pictorial record of the Queen’s life. I could see
upside-down the state coach on the way to West-
minster.

“Lov e’s a Weste rn word.” I said. “We use it for
sentimental reasons or to cover up an obsession with
one woman. These people don’t suffer from obses-
sions. You’re going to be hurt, Pyle, if you aren’t
capful.”

“I’d have beaten you up if it wasn’t for that leg.”

“You should be grateful to me — and Phuong’s
sister, of course. You can go ahead without scruples
now — and you are very scrupulous in some ways,
aren’t you, when it doesn't come to plastics.”

“Plastics?”

“I hope to God you know what you are doing
there. Oh, I know your motives are good, they
always are.” He looked puzzled and suspicious. “I
wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you
might understand a little more about human beings.
And that applies to your country too, Pyle.”

“I want to give her a decent life. This place —
smells.”

“We keep the smell down with joss sticks. I
suppose you’ll offer her a deep freeze and a car for
herself and the newest television set and ...”

“And children,” he said.

172

“Bright young American citizens ready to testify.”

“And what will you give her? You weren’t going
to take her home.”

“No, I’m not that cruel. Unless I can afford her a
return ticket.”

“You’ll just keep her as a comfortable lay until
you leave.”

“She’s a human being, Pyle. She’s capable of
deciding.”

“On faked evidence. And a child at that.”

“She’s no child. She’s tougher than you’ll ever
be. Do you know the kind of polish that doesn’t
take scratches? That’s Phuong. She can survive a
dozen of us. She’ll get old, that’s all. She’ll suffer
from childbirth and hunger and cold and rheuma-
tism, but she’ll never suffer like we do from thoughts,
obsessions — she won’t scratch, she’ll only decay.”
But even while I made my speech and watched her
turn the page (a family group with Princess Anne),
I knew I was inventing a character just as much as
Pyle was. One n eve r knows anotiic r human being;
for all I could tell, she was as scared as the rest of us:
she didn’t have the gift of expression, that was all.
And I remembered that first tormenting year when
I had tried so passionately to understand her, when
I had begged her to tell me what she thought and
had scared her with my unreasoning anger at her
silences. Even my desire had been a weapon, as
though when one plunged one’s sword towards the
victim’s womb, she would lose control and speak.

“You’ve said enough,” I told Pyle. “You know
all there is to know. Please go.”

“Phuong,” he called.

173

“Monsieur Pyle?” she inquired, looking up from
the scrutiny of Windsor Castle, and her formality was
comic and reassuring at that moment.

“He’s cheated you.”

“Je ne comprends pas.”

“Oh, go away,” I said. “Go to your Third Force
and Yolk Harding and the R6le of Democracy. Go
away and play with plastics.”

Later I had to admit that he had carried out my
instructions to the letter.

174

PART THREE

CHAPTER I

(0

It was nearly a fortnight after Pyle’s death
before I saw Vigot again. I was going up the
Boulevard Charner when his voice called to me
from Le Club. It was the restaurant most favoured
in those days by members of the Surete, who, as a
kind of defiant gesture to those who hated thdfn,
would lunch and drink on the ground-floor while the
general public fed upstairs out of the reach of a
partisan with a hand-grenade. I joined him and he
ordered me a vermouth cassis. “Play for it?”

“If you like,” and I took out my 'dice for the
ritual game of Quatre Vingt-et-un. How those
figures and the sight of dice bring back to mind the
war-years in Indo-China. Anywhere in the world
when I see two men dicing I am back in the streets
of Hanoi or Saigon or among the blasted buildings
of Phat Diem, I see the parachutists, protected like
caterpillars by their strange markings, patrolling by
the sanals, I hear the sound of the mortars closing
in, and perhaps I see a dead child.

“Sans vaseline,” Vigot said, throwing a four-two-
one. He pushed the last match towards me. The
sexual jargon of the game was common to all the
Surete; perhaps it had been invented by Vigot and

177

taken up by his junior officers, who hadn’t however
taken up Pascal. “Sous-lieutenant.” Every game you
lost raised you a rank — you played till one or other
became a captain or a commandant. He won the
second game as well and while he counted out the
matches he said, “We’ve found Pyle’s dog.”

“Yes?”

“I suppose it had refused to leave the body.
Anyway they cut its throat. It was in the mud fifty
yards away. Perhaps it dragged itself that far.”

“Are you still interested?”

“The American Minister keeps bothering us. We
don’t have the same trouble, thank God, when a
Frenchman is killed. But then those cases don’t
hiiVe rarity value.”

We played for the division of matches and then
the real game started. It was uncanny how quickly
Vigot threw a four-two-one. He * reduced his
matches to three and I threw the lowest score
possible. “Nanette,” Vigot said, pushing me over
two matches. When he had got rid of his last match
he said, “Capitaine,” and I called the waiter for
drinks. “Does anybody ever beat you?” I asked.

“Not often. Do you want your revenge?”

“Another time. What a gambler you could be,
Vigot. Do you play any other game of chance?”

He smiled miserably, and for some reason I
thought of that blonde wife of his who was said to
betray him with his junior officers.

“Oh well,” he said, “there’s always the biggest of
all.”

“The biggest?”

“ ‘Let us weigh the gain and loss,’ he quoted, ‘in

178

wagering that God is, let us estimate these two
chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose yoti
lose nothing.’ ”

I quoted Pascal back at him — it was the only
passage I remembered. “ ‘Both he who chooses
heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault.
They are both in the wrong. The true course is not
to wager at all.’ ”

“ ‘Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional.
You are embarked.’ You don’t follow your own
principles, Fowler. You’re engage, like the rest of us.”

“Not in religion.”

“I wasn’t talking about religion. As a matter of
fact,” he said, “I was thinking about Pyle’s dog.”
“Oh.”

“Do you remember what you said to me — about
finding clues on its paws, analysing the dirt and
so on?”

“And you said you weren’t Maigrct or Lecoq.”

“I’ve not done so badly after all,” he said. “Pyle
usually took the dog with him when he went out,
didn’t he?”

“I suppose so.”

“It was too valuable to let it stray by itself?”

“It wouldn’t be very safe. They eat chows, don’t
they, in this country?” He began to put the dice in
his pocket. “My dice, Vigot.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I was thinking . .

“\Vhy did you say I was engage?”

“When did you last sec Pyle’s dog, Fowler?”

“God knows. I don’t keep an engagement book
for dogs.”

“When are you due to go home?”

179

“I don’t know exactly.” I never like giving
ftiformation to the police. It saves them trouble.

“I’d like — tonight — to drop in and see you. At
ten? If you will be alone.”

“I’ll send Phuong to the cinema.”

“Things all right with you again — with her?”

“Yes.

“Strange. I got the impression that you are —
well — unhappy. ’ ’

“Surely there are plenty of possible reasons
for that, Vigot.” I added bluntly, “You should
know.”

“Me?”

“You’re not a very happy man yourself.”

“Oh, I’ve nothing to complain about. ‘A ruined
house is not miserable.’ ”

“What’s that?”

“Pascal again. It’s an argument for, being proud
of misery. ‘A tree is not miserable.’ ”

“What made you into a policeman, Vigot?”

“There yere a number of factors. The need to
earn a living, a curiosity about people, and — yes,
even that, a love of Gaboriau.”

“Perhaps you ought to have been a priest.”

“I didn’t read the right authors for that — in those
days.”

“You still suspect me, don’t you, of being con-
cerned?”

He rose and drank what was left of his vermouth
cassis.

“I’d like to talk to you, that’s all.”

I thought after he had turned and gone that he
had looked at me with compassion, as he might have

180

looked at some prisoner for whose capture he was
responsible undergoing his sentence for life.

( 2 )

I had been punished. It was as though Pyle, when
he left my flat, had sentenced me, to so many weeks
of uncertainty. Every time that I returned home it
was with the expectation of disaster. Sometimes
Phuong would not be there, and I found it impossible
to settle to any work till she returned, for I always
wondered whether she would ever return. I would
ask her where she had been (trying to keep anxiety
or suspicion out of my voice) and sometimes she
would reply the market or the shops and produce her
piece of evidence (even her readiness to confirm her
story seemed at that period unnatural), and some-
times it was the cinema, and the stub of her ticket
was there to prove it, and sometimes it was her
sister’s — that was where I believed she met Pyle. I
made love to her in those days savagely as though I
hated her, but what I hated was the future. Lone-
liness lay in my bed and I took loneliness into my
arms at night. She didn’t change: she cooked for
me, she made my pipes, she gently and sweetly laid
out her body for my pleasure (but it was no longer a
pleasure), and just as in those early days I wanted
her mind, now I wanted to read her thoughts, but
they were hidden away in a language I couldn’t
speak. I didn’t want to question her. I didn’t want
to make her lie (as long as no lie was spoken openly
I could pretend that we were the same to each other
as we had always been), but suddenly my anxiety

181

would speak for me, and I said, “When did you last
•see Pyle?”

She hesitated — or was it that she was really think-
ing back? “When he came here,” she said.

I began — almost unconsciously — to run down
everything that was American. My conversation
was full of the poverty of American literature, the
scandals of American politics, the beastliness of
American children. It was as though she were being
taken away from me by a nation rather than by a
man. Nothing that America could do was right. I
became a bore on the subject of America, even with
my French friends who were ready enough to share
my antipathies. It was as if I had been betrayed,
bvt one is not betrayed by an enemy.

It was just at that time that the incident occurred
of the bicycle-bombs. Coming back from the Imperial
Bar to an empty flat (was she at the cinema or with
her sister?) I found that a note had been pushed
under the door. It was from Dominguez. He
apologised^ for being still sick and asked me to be
outside the big store at the comer of the Boulevard
Chamer around ten-thirty the next morning. He
was writing at the request of Mr. Chou, but I
suspected that Mr. Hcng was the more likely to
require my presence.

The whole affair, as it turned out, was not worth
more than a paragraph, and a humorous paragraph
at that. It bore no relation to the sad and heavy
war in the north, those canals in Phat Diem choked
with the grey days-old bodies, the pounding of the
mortars, the white glare of napalm. I had been
waiting for about a quarter of an hour by a stall of

182

flowers when a truck-load of police drove up with a
grinding of brakes and a squeal of rubber from the
direction of the Surete Headquarters in the rue
Catinat: the men disembarked and ran for the store,
as though they were charging a mob, but there was
no mob — only a zareba of bicycles. Every large
building in Saigon is fenced in by them — no
university city in the West contains so many bicycle-
owners. Before I had time to adjust my camera the
comic and inexplicable action had been accom-
plished. The police had forced their way among the
bicycles and emerged with three which they carried
over their heads into the boulevard and dropped into
the decorative fountain. Before I could intercept a
single policeman they were back in their truck arM
driving hard down the Boulevard Bonnard.

“Operation Bicyclette,” a voice said. It was Mr.
Heng.

“What is it?” I asked. “A practice? For what?”

“Wait a while longer,” Mr. Heng said.

A few idlers began to approach the fountain,
where one wheel stuck up like a buoy as though to
warn shipping away from the wrecks below: a
policeman crossed the road shouting and waving
his hands.”

“Let’s have a look,” I said.

“Better not,” Mr. Heng said, and examined his
watch . The hands stood at four minutes past eleven.

“You’re fast,” I said.

“It always gains.” And at that moment the
fountain exploded over the pavement. A bit of
decorative coping struck a window and the glass
fell like the water in a bright shower. Nobody was

183

% hurt. We shook the water and glass from our clothes.
A bicycle wheel hummed like a top in the road,
staggered and collapsed. “It must be just eleven,”
Mr. Heng said.

“What on earth . . . ?”

“I thought you would be interested,” Mr. Hcng
said. “I hope you were interested.”

“Come and have a drink?”

“No, I am sorry. I must go back to Mr. Chou’s,
but first let me show you something.” He led me to
the bicycle park and unlocked his own machine.
“Look carefully.”

“A Raleigh,” I said.

“No, look at the pump. Does it remind you of
anything?” He smiled patronisingly at my mysti-
fication and pushed off. Once he turned and waved
his hand, pedalling towards Cholon and the ware-
house of junk. At the Surety, where I went for
information, I realised what he meant. The mould
I had seen in his warehouse had been shaped like a
half-section of a bicycle-pump. That day all over
Saigon innocent bicycle-pumps had proved to be
plastic bombs and gone off at the stroke of eleven,
except where the police, acting on information which
I suspect emanated from Mr. Hcng, had been able
to anticipate the explosions. It was all quite trivial —
ten explosions, six people slightly injured, and God
knows how many bicycles. My colleagues — except
for the correspondent of the Extreme Orient, who called
it an “outrage” — knew they could only get space by
making fun of the affair. “Bicycle Bombs” made a
good headline. All of them blamed the Com-
munists. I was the only one to write that the bombs

184

were a demonstration on the part of General The,
and my account was altered in the office. The
General wasn’t news. You couldn’t waste space by
identifying him. I sent a message of regret through
Dominguez to Mr. Heng — I had done my best. Mr.
Heng sent a polite verbal reply. It seemed to me
then that he — or his Vietminh committee — had
been unduly sensitive; no one held the affair
seriously against the Communists. Indeed, if any-
thing were capable of doing so, it would have given
them the reputation for a sense of humour. “What’ll
they think of next?” people said at parties, and the
whole absurd affair was symbolised to me too in the
bicycle-wheel gaily spinning like a top in the middle
of the boulevard. I never even mentioned to Pyle
what I had heard of his connection with the General.
Let him play harmlessly with plastic: it might keep
his mind off Phuong. All the same, because I
happened to be in the neighbourhood one evening,
because I had nothing better to do, I called in at
Mr. Muoi’s garage.

It was a small, untidy place, not unlike a junk
warehouse itself, in the Boulevard de la Somme. A
car was jacked up in the middle of the floor with its
bonnet open, gaping like the cast of some pre-
historic animal in a provincial museum which
nobody ever visits. I don't believe anyone remem-
bered it was there. The floor was littered with
scraps of iron and old boxes — the Vietnamese don’t
like throwing anything away, any more than a
Chinese cook partitioning a duck into seven courses
will dispense with so much as a daw. I wondered
why anybody had so wastefully disposed of the

185 Ci

empty drums and the damaged mould — perhaps it
was a theft by an employee making a few piastres,
perhaps somebody had been bribed by the ingenious
Mr. Heng.

Nobody seemed about, so I went in. Perhaps, I
thought, they are keeping away for a while in case
the police call. It was possible that Mr. Heng had
some contact in the Surete, but even then it was
unlikely that the police would act. It was better
from their point of view to let people assume that
the bombs were Communist.

Apart from the car and the junk strewn over the
concrete floor there was nothing to be seen. It was
difficult to picture how the bombs could have been
manufactured at Mr. Muoi’s. I was very vague
about how one turned the white dust I had seen in
the drum into plastic, but surely the process was too
complex to be carried out here, wherc*cven the two
petrol pumps in the street seemed to be suffering
from neglect. I stood in the entrance and looked
out into the street. Under the trees in the centre of
the boulevard the barbers were at work: a scrap of
mirror nailed to a tree-trunk caught the flash of the
sun. A girl went by at a trot under her mollusc hat
carrying two baskets slung on a pole. The fortune-
teller squatting against the wall of Simon Freres had
found a customer: an old man with a wisp of beard
like Ho Chi Minh’s who watched impassively the
shuffling and turning of the ancient cards. What
possible future had he got that was worth a piastre?
In the Boulevard de la Somme you lived in the open:
everybody here knew all about Mr. Muoi, but the
police had no key which would unlock their con-

186

Science. This was the level of life where everything
was known, but you couldn’t step down to that level*
as you could step into the street. I remembered the
old women gossiping on our landing beside the
communal lavatory: they heard everything too, but
I didn’t know what they knew.

I went back into the garage and entered*a small
office at the back: there was the usual Chinese
commercial calendar, a littered desk — price-lists
and a bottle of gum and an adding-machine, some
paper-clips, a teapot and three cups and a lot of
unsharpened pencils, and for so|ne reason an
unwritten picture-postcard of the Eiffel 7'owcr.
York Harding might write in graphic abstractions
about the Third Force, but this was what it carjte
down to — this was It. There was a door id the back
wall: it was locked, but the key was on the desk
among the pencils. I opened the door and went
through.

I was in a small shed about the size of the garage.
It contained one piece of machinery' that at first
sight seemed like a cage of rods anil wires furnished
with innumerable perches to hold some wingless
adult bird — it gave the impression of being tied up
with old rags, but the rags had probably been used
for cleaning when Mr. Muoi and his assistants had
been called away. I found the name of a manu-
facturer — somebody in Lyons and a patent number
— patenting what? I switched on the current and
the old machine came alive: the rods had a purpose —
the contraption was like an old man gathering his
last vital force, pounding down his fist, pounding
down . . . This thing was jfill a press, though in its

187

own sphere it must have belonged to the same era as
•the nickelodeon, but I suppose that in this country
where nothing was ever wasted, and where every-
thing might be expected to come one day to finish
its career (I remembered seeing that ancient movie
The Great Train Robbery jerking its way across a
screen, r still giving entertainment, in a back-street
in Nam Dinh), the press was still employable.

I examined the press more closely: there were
traces of a white powder. Diolacton, I thought,
something in common with milk. There was no
sign of a drum or a mould. I went back into the
office and into the garage. I felt like giving the old
car a pat on the mudguard: it had a long wait ahead
o£it, perhaps, but it too one day . . . Mr. Muoi and
his assistants were probably by this time somewhere
among the rice fields on the way to the sacred
mountain where General Th6 had his^headquarters.
When now at last I raised my voice and called
“Monsieur Muoi!” I could imagine I was far
away frorr> the garage and the boulevard and the
barbers, back among those fields where I had taken
refuge on the road to Tanyin. “Monsieur Muoi!”
I could sec a man turn his head among the stalks
of rice.

I walked home and up on my landing the old
women burst into their twitter of the hedges which
I could understand no more than the gossip of the
birds. Phuong was not in — only a note to say that
she was with her sister. I lay down on the bed — I
still tired easily — and fell asleep. When I woke I saw
the illuminated dial of my alarm pointing to one
twenty-five and I turned my head expecting to find

1 88

Phuong asleep beside me. But the pillow was
undented. She must have changed the sheet that
day — it carried the coldness of the laundry. I got up
and opened the drawer where she kept her scarves,
and they were not there. I went to the bookshelf--
the pictorial Life of the Royal Family had gone too.
She had taken her dowry with her.

In the moment of shock there is little pain: pain
began about three a.m. when I began to plan the
life I had still somehow to live and to remember
memories in order somehow to eliminate them.
Happy memories are the worst, and I tried to
remember the unhappy. I was practised. I had
lived all this before. I knew I could do what was
necessary, but I was so much older — I felt I had little
energy left to reconstruct.

( 3 )

I went to the American Legation and asked for
Pyle. It was necessary to fill in a form at the door
and give it to a military policeman. He said, “You
haven’t put the purpose of the visit.”

“He’ll know,” I said.

“You’re by appointment, then?”

“You can put it that way if you like.”

“Seems silly to you, I guess, but we have to be
very careful. Some strange types come around
here.”

“So I’ve heard.” He shifted his chewing-gum to
another side and entered the lift. I waited. I had
no idea what to say to Pyle. This was a scene I had
never played before. The policeman returned. He

189

said grudgingly, “I guess you can go up. Room 12 A.
First floor.”

When I entered the room I saw that Pyle wasn’t
there. Joe sat behind the desk: the E*onomic
Attach^: I still couldn’t remember his surname.
Phuong’s sister watched me from behind a typing
desk. -Was it triumph that I read in those brown
acquisitive eyes?

“Come in, come in, Tom,” Joe called boisterously.
“Glad to sec you. How’s your leg? We don’t often
get a visit from you to our little outfit. Pull up a
chair. Tell me how you think the new offensive’s
going. Saw Granger last night at the Continental.
He’s for the north again. That boy’s keen. Where
^here’s news there’s Granger. Have a cigarette.
Help yourself. You know Miss f lei? Can’t remember
all these names— too hard for an old fellow like me.
I call her ‘Hi, there!’— she likes it. None of this
stuffy colonialism. What’s the gossip of the market,
Tom? You fellows certainly do keep your cars to the
ground. Sorry to hear about your leg. Alden told
me . . .”

“Where’s Pyle?”

“Oh, Alden’s not in the office this morning.
Guess he’s at home. Does a lot of his work at home.”

“I know what he does at home.”

“That boy’s keen. Eh, what’s that you said?”

“Anyway, I know one of the things he docs at
home.”

“I don't catch on, Tom. Slow Joe — that’s me.
Always was. Always will be.”

“He sleeps with my girl — your typist’s sister.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

190

“Ask her. She fixed it. Pyle’s taken my girl.”

“Look here, Fowler, I thought you’d come here
on business. We can’t have scenes in the office,
you know.”

“I came here to see Pyle, but I suppose he’s
hiding.”

“Now, you’re the very last man who ought to
make a remark like that. After what Alden did for
you.”

“Oh yes, yes, of course. He saved my life, didn’t
he? But I never asked him to.”

“At great danger to himself. That boy’s got
guts.”

“I don’t care a damn about his guts. There are
other parts of his body that are more apropos.”

“Now we can’t have any innuendoes like that,
Fowler, with a lady in the room.”

“The huly and I know each other well. She failed
to get her rake-off from me, but she’s getting it from
Pyle. All right. I know I’m behaving badly', and
I’m going to go on behaving badly. This is a situa-
tion where people do behave badly.”

“We’ve got a lot of work to do. There’s a report
on the rubber outp”t ”

“Don’t worry, I’m going. But just tell Pyle if he
phones that I called. He might think it polite to
return the visit.” I said to Phuong’s sister, “I hope
you’ve had the settlement witnessed by the notary
public and the American Consul and the Church of
Christ Scientist.”

. I went into the passage. There was a door opposite
me marked Men. I went in and locked the door and
sitting with my head against the cold wall I cried. I

» 9 *

hadn’t cried until now. Even their lavatories were
air-conditioned, and presently the temperate tem-
pered air dried my tears as it dries the spit in your
mouth and the seed in your body.

( 4 )

I left affairs in the hands of Dominguez and went
north. At Haiphong I had friends in the Squadron
Gascogne, and I would spend hours in the bar up
at the airport, or playing bowls on the gravel-path
outside. Officially I was at the front: I could qualify
for keenness with Granger, but it was of no more
value to my paper than had been my excursion to
Fhat Diem. But if one writes about war, self-respect
demands that occasionally one share the risks.

It wasn’t easy to share them for even the most
limited period, since orders had gone hut from Hanoi
that I was to be allowed only on horizontal raids—
raids in this war as safe as a journey by bus, for we
flew above the range of the heavy machine-gun; we
were safe from anything but a pilot’s error or a fault
in the engine. We went out by time-table and came
home by time-table: the cargoes of bombs sailed
diagonally down and the spiral of smoke blew up
from the road junction or the bridge, and then we
cruised back for the hour of the aperitif and drove
our iron bowls across the gravel.

One morning in the mess in the town, as I drank
brandies and sodas with a young officer who had a
passionate desire to visit Southend Pier, orders for a
mission came in. “Like to come?” I said yes. Even
a horizontal raid would be a way of killing time and

192

killing thought. Driving out to the airport he
remarked, “This is a vertical raid.”

“I thought I was forbidden . . .”

“So long as you write nothing about it. It will
show you a piece of country up near the Chinese
border you will not have seen before. Near Lai
Chau.”

“I thought all was quiet there — and in French
hands?”

“It was. They captured this place two days ago.
Our parachutists are only a few hours away. We
want to keep the Viets head down in their holes
until we lxa\e recaptured the post. It means low
diving and machine-gunning. We can only spare
two planes — one’s on the job now. Ever divfc-
bombed before?”

“No.”

“It is a little uncomfortable when you are not
used to it.”

The Gascogne Squadron possessed only small
B.26 bombers — the French called them prostitutes
because with their short wing-span they had no
visible means of support. I was crammed on to a
little metal pad size of a bicycle seat with my
knees against the navigator’s back. We came up the
Red River, slowly climbing, and the Red River at
this hour was really red. It was as though one had
gone far back in time and saw it with the old geo-
grapher’s eyes who had named it first, at just such
an hour when the late sun filled it from bank to
bank; then we turned away at 9,000 feet towards
the Black River, really black, full of shadows, missing
the angle of the light, and the huge majestic scenery

193

of gorge and cliff and jungle wheeled around and
stood upright below us. You could have dropped a
squadron into those fields of green and grey and left
no more trace than a few coins in a harvest field.
Far ahead of us a small plane moved like a midge.
We were taking over.

We circled twice above the tower and the green-
encircled village, then corkscrewed up into the
dfazzling air. The pilot — who was called Trouin —
turned to me and winked: on his wheel were the studs
that controlled the gun and the bomb chamber;
I had that loosening of the bowels as we came into
position for the dive that accompanies any new
experience — the first dance, the first, dinner-party,
the first love. I was reminded of the Great Racer
at the Wembley Exhibition when it came to the top
of the rise — there was no way to get out: you were
trapped with your experience. On th«f dial I had just
time to read 3,000 metres when we drove down. All
was feeling now, nothing was sight. I was forced up
against the navigator’s back: it was as though some-
thing of enormous weight were pressing on my chest.
I wasn’t aware of the moment when the bombs
were released; then the gun chattered and the
cockpit was full of the smell of cordite, and the
weight was off my chest as we rose, and it was the
stomach that fell away, spiralling down like a
suicide to the ground we had left. For forty seconds
Pyle had not existed: even loneliness hadn’t existed.
As we climbed in a great arc I could see the smoke
through the side window pointing at me. Before the
second dive I felt fear — fear of humiliation, fear of
yomiting over the navigator’s back, fear that my

194

aging lungs would not stand the pressure. After
the tenth dive I was aware only of irritation — thfc
affair had gone on too long, it was time to go home.
And again we shot steeply up out of machine-gun
range and swerved away and the smoke pointed.
The village was surrounded on all sides by moun-
tains. Every time we had to make the same approach,
through the same gap. There was no way to yary
our attack. As we dived for the fourteenth time* I
thought, now that I was free from the fear of
humiliation, ‘They have only to fix one machine-gun
into position.’ We lifted our nose again into the
safe air — perhaps they didn’t even have a gun. The
forty minutes of the patrol had seemed interminable,
but it had been free from the discomfort of personal
thought. The sun was sinking as we turned for
home: the geographer’s moment had passed: the
Black River was no longer black, and the Red River
was only gold.

Down we went again, away from the gnarled and
fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over
the neglected rice fields, aimed like a bullet at one
small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon
gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew
apart in a showei of sparks: we didn’t even wait to
see our victims struggling to survive, but climbed
and made for home. I thought again as I had
thought when I saw the dead child at Phat Diem, ‘I
hale war.’ There had been something so shocking in
our sudden fortuitous choice of a prey — we had just
happened to be passing, one burst only was required,
there was no one to return our fire, we were gone
again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.

195

I put on my earphones for Captain Trouin to speak
'to me. He said, “We will make a little detour. The
sunset is wonderful on the calcaire. You must not
miss it,” he added kindly, like a host who is showing
the beauty of his estate, and for a hundred miles wc
trailed the sunset over the Baic d’ Along. The
hclmeteU Martian face looked wistfully out, down the
golden groves among the great humps and arches of
porous stone, and the wound of murder ceased to
bleed.

(5)

Captain Trouin insisted that night on being my
h<jst in the opium-house, though he would not smoke
himself. He liked the smell, he said, he liked the
sense of quiet at the end of the day, but in his
profession relaxation could go no further. There
were officers who smoked, but they were Army men —
he had to have his sleep. We lay in a small cubicle in
a row of pubicles like a dormitory at school, and the
Chinese proprietor prepared my pipes. I hadn't
smoked since Phuong left me. Across the way a
mitisse with long and lovely legs lay coiled after her
smoke reading a glossy woman’s paper, and in the
cubicle next to her two middle-aged Chinese
transacted business, sipping tea, their pipes laid
aside.

I said, “That sampan — this evening — was it doing
any harm?”

Trouin said, “Who knows? In those reaches of the
river we have orders to shoot up anything in sight.”

I smoked my first pipe. I tried not to think of all

196

the pipes I had smoked at home. Trouin said,
“Today’s affair — that is not the worst for someone*
like myself. Over the village they could have shot
us down. Our risk was as great as theirs. What I
detest is napalm bombing. From 3,000 feet, in
safety.” He made a hopeless gesture. “You see the
forest catching fire. God knows what yo» would
see from the ground. The poor devils are burnt
alive, the flames go over them like water. They
are wet through with fire.” He said with anger
against a whole world that didn’t understand, “I’m
not fighting a colonial war. Do you think I’d do
these things for the planters of Terre Rouge? I’d
rather be court-marti ailed. We are fighting all of
your wars, but you leave us the guilt.”

“That sampan,” I said.

“Yes, that sampan too.” He watched me as I
stretched out for my second pipe. “I envy you your
means of escape.”

“You don’t know what I’m escaping from. It’s
not from the war. That’s no concern of mine. I’m
not involved.”

“You will all be. One day.”

“Not me.”

“You arc still limping.”

“They had the right to shoot at me, but they
weren’t even doing that. They were knocking down
a tower. One should always avoid demolition
squads. Even in Piccadilly.”

“One day something will happen. You will take
a side.”

“No, I’m going back to England.”

“That photograph you showed me once . . .”

197

“Oh, I’ve torn that one up. She left me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s the way things happen. One leaves people
oneself, and then the tide turns. It almost makes
me believe injustice.”

“I do. The first time I dropped napalm I thought,
this is the village where I was bora. That is where
M. Dubois, my father’s old friend, lives. The baker
— I was very fond of the baker when I was a child —
is running away down there in the flames I’ve
thrown. The men of Vichy did not bomb their own
country. I felt worse than them.”

“But you still go on.”

“Those are moods. They come only with the
napalm. The rest of the time I think that 1 am
defending Europe. And you know, those others —
they do some monstrous things also. When they
were driven out of Hanoi in 1946 they left terrible
relics among their own people — people they thought
had helped us. There w ? as one girl in the mortuary
— they had not only cut off her breasts, they had
mutilated her lover and stuffed his ...”

“That’s why I won’t be involved.”

“It’s not a matter of reason or justice. We all get
involved in a moment of emotion and then we
cannot get out. War and Love — they have always
been compared.” He looked sadly across the
dormitory to where the metisse sprawled in her great
temporary peace. He said, “I would not have it
otherwise. There is a girl who was involved by her
parents — what is her future when this port falls?
France is only half her home . . .”

“Will it fall?”

198

“You are a journalist. You know better than I do
that we can’t win. You know the road to Hanoi is
cut and mined every night. You know we lose one
class of St. Cyr every year. We were nearly beaten
in ’50. De Lattre has given us two years of grace —
that’s all. But we are professionals: we have to go
on fighting till the politicians tell us to stojf. Prob-
ably they will get together and agree to the same
peace that we could have had at the beginning,
making nonsense of all these years.” His ugly face
which had winked at me before the dive wore a kind
of professional brutality like a Christmas mask from
which a child’s eyes peer through the holes in the
paper. “You would not understand the nonsense,
Fowler. You are not one of us.”

“There are other things in one’s life which make
nonsense of the years.”

He put his hand on my knee with an odd protec-
tive gesture as though he were the older man. “Take
her home,” he said. “That is better than a pipe.”

“How do you know she would come?”

“I have slept with her myself, and Lieutenant
Perrin. Five hundred piastres.”

“Expensive.”

“I expect she would go for three hundred, but
under the circumstances one does not care to bar-
gain*”

But his advice did not prove sound. A man’s
body is limited in the acts which it can perform
and mine was frozen by memory. What my hands
touched that night might be more beautiful than I
was used to, but we are not trapped only by beauty.
She used the same perfume, and suddenly at the

199

moment of entry the ghost of what I’d lost proved
more powerful than the body stretched at my
disposal. I moved away and lay on my back and
desire drained out of me.

“I am sorry,” I said, and lied, “I don’t know what
is the matter with me.”

She Said with great sweetness and misunder-
standing, “Don’t worry. It often happens that way.
It is the opium.”

“Yes,” I said, “the opium.” And I wished to
heaven that it had been.

200

CHAPTER II

(0

It was strange, this first return to Saigon with
nobody to welcome me. At the airport I wished
there were somewhere else to which I could direct
my taxi than the rue Catinat. I thought to myself:
‘Is the pain a little less than when I went away?’ and
tried to persuade myself that it was so. Whert I
reached the landing I saw that the door was open,
and I became breathless with an unreasonable hope.
I walked very slowly towards the door. Until I
reached the door hope would remain alive. I heard
a chair creak, and when 1 came to the door I could
see a pair of shoes, but they were not a woman’s
shoes. I went quickly in, and it was Pyle who lifted
his awkward weight from the chair Phuong used
to use.

He said, “Hullo, Thomas.”

“Hullo, Pyle. How did you get in?”

“I met Dominguez. He was bringing your mail.
I asked him to let me stay.”

“Has Phuong forgotten something?”

“Oh no, but Joe told me you’d been to the Leg-
ation. I thought it would be easier to talk here.”

“What about?”

He gave a lost gesture, iike a boy put up to speak

201

at some school function who cannot find the grown-
up words. “You’ve been away?”

“Yes. And you?”

“Oh, I’ve been travelling around.”

“Still playing with plastics?”

He grinned unhappily. He said, “Your letters
are over*there.”

I could see at a glance there was nothing which
could interest me now: there was one from my
office in London and several that looked like bills,
and one from my bank. I said, “How’s Phuong?”

His face lit up automatically like one of those
electric toys which respond to a particular sound.
“Oh, she’s fine,” he said, and then clamped his
lipm together as though he’d gone too far.

“Sit down, Pyle,” I said. “Excuse me while I
look at this. It’s from my office.”

I opened it. How inopportunely the unexpected
can occur. The editor wrote that he had considered
my last letter and that in view of the confused
situation 4n Indo-China, following the death of
General de Lattrc and the retreat from Hoa Binh,
he was in agreement with my suggestion. He had
appointed a temporary foreign editor and would
like me to stay on in Indo-China for at least another
year. “We shall keep the chair warm for you,” he
reassured me with complete incomprehension. He
believed I cared about the job, and the paper.

I sat down opposite Pyle and re-read the letter
which had come too late. For a moment I had felt
elation as on the instant of waking before one
remembers.

“Bad news?” Pyle asked.

202

“No.” I told myself that it wouldn’t have made
any difference anyway: a reprieve for one yea /
couldn’t stand up against a marriage settlement.

“Are you married yet?” I asked.

“No.” He blushed — he had a great facility in
blushing. “As a matter of fact I’m hoping to get
special leave. Then we could get married a* home —
properly.”

“Is it more proper when it happens at home?”

“Well, I thought — it’s difficult to say these things
to you, you are so darned cynical, Thomas, but it’s
a mark of respect. My father anti mother would be
there — she’d kind of enter the family. It’s important
in view of the past.”

“The past?”

“You know what I mean. I wouldn't want to
leave her behind there with any stigma . .

“Would you leave her behind?”

“I guess so. My mother’s a wonderful woman —
she’d take her around, introduce her, you know, kind
of fit her in. She’d help her to get a home ready
for me.”

I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for Phuong or
not — she had looked forward so to the skyscrapers
and the Statue ot Liberty, but she had so little idea
of all they would involve, Professor and Mrs. Pyle,
the women’s lunch clubs; would they teach her
Canasta? I thought of her that first night in the
Grand Monde, in her white dress, moving so
exquisitely on her eightcen-year-old feet, and I
thought of her a month ago, bargaining over meat
at the butcher’s stores in the Boulevard de la
Somme. Would she like those bright, clean little New

203

England grocery stores where even the celery was
Wapped in cellophane? Perhaps she would. I
couldn’t tell. Strangely I found myself saying as
Pyle might have done a month ago, “Go easy with
her, Pyle. Don’t force things. She can be hurt like
you or me.”

“Of caurse, of course, Thomas.”

“She looks so small and breakable and unlike
our women, but don’t think of her as ... as an
ornament.”

“It’s funny, Thomas, how differently things work
out. I’d been dreading this talk. I thought you’d
be tough.”

“I’ve had time to think, up in the north. There
was a woman there . . . perhaps I saw what you saw
at that whorehouse. It’s a good thing she went
away with you. I might one day have left her behind
with someone like Granger. A bit of tail.”

“And we can remain friends, Thomas?”

“Yes, of course. Only I’d rather not see Phuong.
There’s qpite enough of her around here as it is. I
must find another flat — when I’ve got time.”

He unwound his legs and stood up. “I’m so glad,
Thomas. I can’t tell you how glad I am. I’ve said
it before, I know, but I do really wish it hadn’t
been you.”

“I’m glad it’s you, Pyle.” The interview had n6t
been the way I had foreseen: under the superficial
angry schemes, at some deeper level, the genuine
plan of action must have been formed. All the time
that his innocence had angered me, some judge
within myself had summed up in his favour, had
compared his idealism, his half-baked ideas founded

204

on the works of York Harding, with my cynicism.
Oh, I was right about the facts, but wasn’t he right*
too to be young and mistaken, and wasn’t he
perhaps a better man for a girl to spend her life
with?

We shook hands perfunctorily, but some half-
formulated fear made me follow him out to idle head
of the stairs and call after him. Perhaps there is a
prophet as well as a judge in those interior courts
where our true decisions are made. ‘Pyle, don’t
trust too much to York Harding.”

“York!” He stared up at me from the first
landing.

“We are the old colonial peoples, Pyle, but we've
learnt a bit of reality, we’ve learned not to play wijh
matches. This Third Force— it comes out of a book,
that’s all. General Thd’s only a bandit with a few
thousand men: he’s not a national democracy.”

It was as if he had been staring at me through a
letter-box to see who was there and now, letting the
flap fall, had shut out the unwelcome intruder. His
eyes were out of sight. “I don’t know what you
mean, Thomas.”

“Those bicycle bombs. They were a good joke,
even though one man did lose a foot. But, Pyle, you
can’t trust men like The. They aren’t going to save
tlTe East from Communism. We know their kind.”

“We?”

“The old colonialists.”

“I thought you took no sides.”

“I don’t, Pyle, but if someone has got to make a
mess of things in your outfit, leave it to Joe. Go home
with Phuong. Forget the Third Force.”

205

“Of course I always value your advice, Thomas,”
he said formally. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

“I suppose so.”

(2)

The weeks moved on, but somehow I hadn’t yet
found myself a new flat. It wasn’t that I hadn’t
time. The annual crisis of the war had passed again:
the hot, wet crachin had settled on the north: the
French were out of Hoa Binh, the rice campaign
was over in Tonkin and the opium campaign in
Laos. Dominguez could cover easily all that was
needed in the south. At last I did drag myself to
see one apartment in a so-called modern building
(Paris Exhibition 1934?) up at the other end of the
rue Catinal beyond the Continental Hotel. It was
the Saigon pied-a-terre of a rubber planter who was
going home. He wanted to sell it lock, stock and
barrel. I have always wondered what the barrels
contain: as for the stock, there were a large number
of engravings from the Paris Salon between 1880
and 1900. Their highest common factor was a big-
bosomed woman with an extraordinary hair-do
and gauzy draperies which somehow always exposed
the great cleft buttocks and hid the field of battle.
In the bathroom the planter had been rather mdre
daring with his reproductions of Rops.

“You like art?” I asked and he smirked back at
me like a fellow conspirator. He was fat with a little
black moustache and insufficient hair.

“My best pictures arc in Paris,” he said.

There w r as an extraordinary tall ash-tray in the

206

living-room made like a naked woman with a bowl #
in her hair, and there were china ornaments of
naked girls embracing tigers, and one very odd one
of a girl stripped to the waist riding a bicycle. In
the bedroom facing his enormous bed was a great
glazed oil painting of two girls sleeping together. I
asked him the price of his apartment without his
collection, but he would not agree to separate the
two.

“You are not a collector?” he asked.

“Well, no.”

“I have some books also,” he said, “which I
would throw in, though I intended to take these
back to France.” He unlocked a glass-fronted book-
case and showed me his library — there w^re expeh-
sivc illustrated editions of Aphrodite and Nana , there
was La Garfonnc, and even several Paul de Kocks. I
was tempted to ask him whether he would sell himself
with his collection: he went with them: he was
period too. He said, “If you live alone in the tropics
a collection is company.”

I thought of Phuong just because of her complete
absence. So it always is: when you escape to a desert
the silence shouts in your ear.

“I don’t think my paper would allow me to buy an
a£l collection.”

He said, “It would not. of course, appear on the
receipt.”

I was glad Pyle had not seen him: the man might
have lent his own features to Pyle’s imaginary “old
colonialist”, who was repulsive enough without
him. When I came out it was nearly half past
eleven and I went down as lar as the Pavilion for a

207

v glass of iced beer. The Pavilion was a coffee centre
for European and American women and I was con-
fident that I would not see Phuong there. Indeed I
knew exactly where she would be at this time of
day — she was not a girl to break her habits, and so,
coming from the planter’s apartment, I had crossed
the road* to avoid the milk bar where at this time of
day she had her chocolate malt. Two young
American girls sat at the next table, neat and clean
in the heat, scooping up ice-cream. They each had a
bag slung on the left shoulder and the bags were
identical, with brass eagle badges. Their legs were
identical too, long and slender, and their noses, just
a shade tilted, and they were eating their ice-cream
with concentration as though they were making an
experiment in the college laboratory. I wondered
whether they were Pyle’s colleagues: they were
charming, and I wanted to send th<?m home, too.
They finished their ices and one looked at her watch.
“We’d better be going,” she said, “to be on the safe
side.” I Wondered idly what appointment they had.

“Warren said wc mustn’t stay later than cleven-
twenty-five.”

“It’s past that now.”

“It would be exciting to stay. I don’t know what
it’s all about, do you?”

“Not exactly, but Warren said better not.”

“Do you think it’s a demonstration?”

“I’ve seen so many demonstrations,” the other
said wearily, like a tourist glutted with churches.
She rose and laid on their table the money for the
ices. Before going she looked around the cafe, and
the mirrors caught her profile at every freckled
, 208

angle. There was only myself left and a dowdy -
middle-aged Frenchwoman who was carefully and
uselessly making up her face. Those two hardly
needed make-up, the quick dash of a lipstick, a
comb through the hair. For a moment her glance
had rested on me — it was not like a woman’s glance,
but a man’s, very straightforward, speculating on
some course of action. Then she turned quickly to
her companion. “We’d better be off.” I watched
them idly as they went out side by side into the sun-
splintered street. It was impossible to conceive
cither of them a prey to untidy passion: they did not
belong to rumpled sheets and the sweat of sex. Did
they take deodorants to bed with them? I found
myself for a moment envying them thei^ sterilized
world, so different from this world that I inhabited —
— which suddenly inexplicably broke in pieces.
Two of the mirrors on the wall flew at me and
collapsed half-way. The dowdy Frenchwoman was
on her knees in a wreckage of chairs and tables. Her
compact lay open and unhurt in my lap and oddly
enough I sat exactly where I had sat before, although
my table had joined the wreckage around the
Frenchwoman. A curious garden-sound filled the
cafe: the regular drip of a fountain, and looking at
t^e bar I saw rows of smashed bottles which let out
their contents in a multi-coloured stream — the red
of porto, the orange of cointreau, the green of
chartreuse, the cloudy yellow of pastis, across the
floor of the cafe. The Frenchwoman sat up and
calmly looked around for her compact. I gave it
her and she thanked me formally, sitting on the
floor. I realised that I didn’t hear her very well,

209

^The explosion had been so close that my ear-drums
had still to recover from the pressure.

I thought rather petulantly, ‘Another joke with
plastics: what does Mr. Heng expect me to write
now?’ but when I got into the Place Gamier, I
realised by the heavy clouds of smoke that this was
no joke.* The smoke came from the cars burning in
the car-park in front of the national theatre, bits of
cars were scattered over the square, and a man
without his legs lay twitching at the edge of the
ornamental gardens. People were crowding in from
the rue Catinat, from the Boulevard Bonnard. The
sirens of police cars, the bells of the ambulances and
fire-engines came at one remove to my shocked ear-
drums. For one moment I had forgotten that Phuong
must have been in the milk bar on the other side of
the square. The smoke lay between. 1 couldn’t sec
through.

I stepped out into the square and a policeman
stopped me. They had formed a cordon round the
edge to pnfcvent the crowd increasing, and already
the stretchers were beginning to emerge. 1 implored
the policeman in front of me, “Let me across. I
have a friend ...”

“Stand back,” he said. “Everyone here has
friends.” ,

He stood on one side to let a priest through, and I
tried to follow the priest, but he pulled me back. I
said, “I am the Press,” and searched in vain for the
wallet in which I had my card, but I couldn’t find
it: had I come out that day without it? I said, “At
least tell me what happened to the milk bar”: the
smoke was clearing and I tried to see, but the crowd

210

between was too great. He said something I didn’t
catch.

“What did you say?”

He repeated, “I don’t know. Stand back. You
arc blocking the stretchers.”

Could I have dropped my wallet in the Pavilion?
I turned to go back and there was 3yle. He
exclaimed, “Thomas.”

“Pyle,” I said, “for Christ’s sake, where’s your
Legation pass? We’ve got to get across. Phuong’s
in the milk bar.”

“No, no,” he said.

“Pyle, she is. She always goes there. At eleven
thirty. We’ve got to find her.”

“She isn’t there, Thomas.”

“How do you know?” Where’s your card?”

“I warned her not to go.”

I turned back to the policeman, meaning to throw
him to one side and make a run for it across the
square: he might shoot: I didn’t care — and then the
word ‘warn’ reached my consciousness. I took Pyle
by the arm. “Warn?” I said. “What do you mean
‘warn? ’ ”

“I told her to keep away this morning.”

The pieces fell together in my mind. “And
Warren?” I said. “Who’s Warren? He warned those
§irls too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There mustn’t be any American casualties, must
there?” An ambulance forced its way up the rue
Gatinat into the square, and the policeman who had
stopped me moved to one side to let it through. The
policeman beside him wa^ i ngaged in an argument.

2 1 1

I pushed Pyle forward and ahead of me into the
square before we could be stopped.

We were among a congregation of mourners. The
police could prevent others entering the square;
they were powerless to clear the square of the
survivors and the first-comers. The doctors were too
busy to attend to the dead, and so the dead were left
to their owners, for one can own the dead as one
owns a chair. A woman sat on the ground with what
was left of her baby in her lap; with a kind of
modesty she had covered it with her straw peasant
hat. She was still and silent, and what struck me
most in the square was the silence. It was like a
church I had once visited during Mass — the only
sounds came from those who served, except where
here and there the Europeans wept and implored
and fell silent again as though shamed by the
modesty, patience and propriety of the East. The
legless torso at the edge of the garden still twitched,
like a chicken which has lost its head. From the
man’s shirt* he had probably been a trishaw-driver.

Pyle said, “It’s awful.” He looked at the wet on
his shoes and said in a sick voice, “What’s that?”

“Blood,” I said. “Haven’t you ever seen it
before?”

He said, “I must get them cleaned before I sec the
Minister.” I don’t think he knew what he was
saying. He was seeing a real war for the first time:
he had punted down into Phat Diem in a kind of
schoolboy dream, and anyway in his eyes soldiers
didn’t count.

“You see what a drum of Diolacton can do,” I
said, “in the wrong hands.” I forced him, with my

212

hand on his shoulder, to look around. I said, “This
is the hour when the place is always full of women
and children — it’s the shopping hour. Why choose
that of all hours?”

He said weakly, “There was to have been a
parade.”

“And you hoped to catch a few colonels. JBut the
parade was cancelled yesterday, Pyle.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know!” I pushed him into a patch of
blood where a stretcher had lain. “You ought to be
better informed.”

“I was out of town,” he said, looking down at his
shoes. “They should have culled it off.”

“And missed the fun?” 1 asked him. “Do you
expect General The to lose his demonstration? This
is better than a parade. Women and children are
news, and soldiers aren’t, in a war. This will hit
the world’s Press. You’ve put General The on the
map all right, Pyle. You’ve got the Third Force and
National Democracy all over your right shoe. Go
home to Phuong and tell her about your heroic dead
— there are a few dozen less of her country people
to worry about.”

A small fat priest scampered by, carrying some-
thing on a dish under a napkin. Pyle had been
siftnt a long while, and I i.ad nothing more to say.
Indeed I had said too much. He looked white and
beaten and ready to faint, and I thought, ‘What’s the
good? he’ll alway r s be innocent, you can’t blame the
innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do
is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a
kind of insanity.’

213

He said, “The wouldn’t have done this. I’m sure
he wouldn’t. Somebody deceived him. The Com-
munists . . .”

He was imprcgnably armoured by his good inten-
tions and his ignorance. 1 left him standing in the
square and went on up the rue Catinat to where the
hideou$ pink Cathedral blocked the way. Already
people were flocking iri: it must have been a comfort
to them to be able to pray for the dead to the dead.

Unlike them, I had reason for thankfulness, for
wasn’t Phuong alive? Hadn’t Phuong been ‘warned’?
But what I remembered was the torso in the square,
the baby on its mother’s lap. They had not been
warned: they had not been sufficiently important.
And if the parade had taken place would they not
have been there just the same, out of curiosity, to
see the soldiers, and hear the speakers, and throw
the flowers? A two-hundred-pound bomb does not
discriminate. How many dead colonels justify a
child’s or a trishaw driver’s death when you are
building a national democratic front? I stopped a
motor-trishaw and told the driver to take me to the
Quai Mytho.

214

PART FOUR

CHAPTER I

I HAD GIVEN PHUONG MONEY TO TAKE HER SISTER

to the cinema so that she would be safely out of the
way. I went out to dinner myself with Dominguez
and was back in my room waiting when Vigot called
sharp on ten. He apologised for not taking a drink —
he said he was too tired and a drink might send him
to sleep. It had been a very long day.

“Murder and sudden death?”

“No. Petty thefts. And a few suicides. These
people love to gamble and when they have lost
everything they kill themselves. Perhaps I would
not have become a policeman if I had known how
much time I would have to spend in mortuaries. I
do not like the smell of ammonia. Perhaps after all
I will have a beer.”

“I haven’t a refrigerator, I’m afraid.”

“Unlike the mortuary. A little English whisky,
then?”

I remembered the night I had gone down to the
mtirtuary with him and i ney had slid out Pyle’s
body like a tray of ice-cubes.

“So you are not going home?” he asked.

“You’ve been checking up?”

“Yes.”

I held the whisky out to him, so that he could see
how calm my nerves were. “Vigot, I wish you’d tell

217

H

me why you think I was concerned in Pyle’s death.
Is it a question of motive? That I wanted Phuong
back? Or do you imagine it was revenge for losing
her?”

“No. I’m not so stupid. One doesn’t take one’s
enemy’s book as a souvenir. There it is on your shelf.
The R6]f of the West. Who is this York Harding?”

“He’s the man you arc looking for, Vigot. He
killed Pyle — at long range.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’s a superior sort of journalist — they call them
diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an
idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea.
Pyle came out here full of York Harding’s idea.
Harding had been here once for a week on his way
from Bangkok to Tokyo. Pyle made the mistake of
putting his idea into practice. Harding wrote about
a Third Force. Pyle formed one — \ shoddy little
bandit with two thousand men and a couple of tame
tigers. He got mixed up.”

“You never do, do you?”

“I’ve tried not to be.”

“But you failed, Fowler.” For some reason I
thought of Captain Trouin and that night which
seemed to have happened years ago in the Haiphong
opium house. What was it he had said? something
about all of us getting involved sooner or later ii? a
moment of emotion. I said, “You would have made
a good priest, Vigot. What is it about you that would
make it so easy to confess — if there were anything to
confess?”

“I have never wanted any confessions:”

“But you’ve received them?”

218

“From time to time.”

“Is it because like a priest it’s your job not to be
shocked, but to be sympathetic? ‘M. Flic, I must
tell you exactly why I battered in the old lady’s
skull.’ ‘Yes, Gustave, take your time and tell me
why it was!’ ”

“You have a whimsical imagination. Antn’t you
drinking, Fowler?”

“Surely it’s unwise for a criminal to drink with a
police officer?”

“I have never said you were a criminal.”

“But suppose the drink unlocked even in me the
desire to confess? There are no secrets of the con-
fessional in your profession.”

“Secrecy is seldom important to a rnan who
confesses: even when it’s to a priest. He has other
motives.”

“To cleanse himself?”

“Not always. Sometimes he only wants to see
himself clearly as he is. Sometimes he is just weary
of deception. You are not a criminal, Fowler, but
I would like to know why you lied to me. You saw
Pyle the night he died.”

“What gives yon that idea?”

“1 don’t for a moment think you killed him. You
would hardly have used a rusty bayonet.”

•“Rusty?”

“Those are the kind of details we get from an
autopsy. I told you, though, that was not the cause
of death. Dakow mud.” He held out his glass for
another whisky. “Let me see now. You had a
drink at the Continental at six ten?”

“Yes.”

219

“And at six forty-five you were talking to another
journalist at the door of the Majestic?”

“Yes, Wilkins. I told you all this, Vigot, before.
That night.”

“Yes. I’ve checked up since then. It’s wonderful
how you carry such petty details in your head.”

“I’m» a reporter, Vigot.”

“Perhaps the times arc not quite accurate, but
nobody could blame you, could they, if you were a
quarter of an hour out here and ten minutes out
there. You had no reason to think the times impor-
tant. Indeed how suspicious it would be if you had
been completely accurate.”

“Haven’t I been?”

“Not quite. It was at five to seven that you talked
to Wilkins.”

“Another ten minutes.”

“Of course. As I said. And it had 4>nly just struck
six when you arrived at the Continental.”

“My watch is always a little fast,” I said. “What
time do ypu make it now?”

“Ten eight.”

“Ten eighteen by mine. You sec.”

He didn’t bother to look. He said, “Then the
time you said you talked to Wilkins was twenty-
five minutes out — by your watch. That’s quite a
mistake, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps I readjusted the time in my mind.
Perhaps I’d corrected my watch that day. I some-
times do.”

“What interests me,” Vigot said, “(could I have
a little more soda? — you have made this rather
strong) is that you are not at all angry with me. It

220

is not very nice to be questioned as I am questioning
you.”

“I find it interesting, like a detective story. And,
after all, you know I didn’t kill Pyle — you’ve said
so.”

Vigot said, “I know you were not present at his
murder.”

“I don’t know what you hope to prove by showing
that I was ten minutes out here and five there.”

“It gives a little space,” Vigot said, “a little gap
in time.”

“Space for what?”

“For Pyle to come and see you.”

“Why do you want so much to prove that?”

“Because of the dog,” Vigot said.

“And the mud between its toes?”

“It wasn’t mud. It was cement. You see, some-
where that night, when it was following Pyle, it
stepped into wet cement. I remembered that on the
ground floor of the apartment there are builders at
work — they are still at work. I passed them tonight
as I came in. They work long hours in this country.”

“I wonder how many houses have builders in
them — and wet cerr 'nt. Did any of them remember
the dog?”

“Of course I asked them that. But if they had
they would not have told me. I am the police.” He
stopped talking and leant back in his chair, staring
at his glass. I had a sense that some analogy had
struck him and he was miles away in thought. A
fly crawled over the back of his hand and he did not
brush it away — any more than Dominguez would
have done. I had the feeling of some force immobile

221

and profound. For all I knew, he might have been
praying.

I rose and went through the curtains into the
bedroom. There was nothing I wanted there,
except to get away for a moment from that silence
sitting in a chair. Phuong’s picture-books were back
on thfi shelf. She I tad stuck a telegram for me up
among the cosmetics — some message or other from
the London office. I wasn’t in the mood to open it.
Everything was as it had been before Pyle came.
Rooms don’t change, ornaments stand where you
place them: only the heart decays.

I returned to the sitting-room and Vigot put the
glass to his lips. I said, “I’ve got nothing to tell you.
Nothing at all.”

“Then I’ll be going,” he said. “I don’t suppose I’ll
trouble you again.”

At the door he turned as though he were un-
willing to abandon hope— his hope or mine. “That
was a strange picture for you to go and see that night.
I wouldn’t have thought you cared for costume
drama. What was it? Robin Hood ?”

“ Scaramouche , I think. I had to kill time. And I
needed distraction.”

“Distraction?”

“We all have our private worries, Vigot,” I
carefully explained.

When Vigot was gone there was still an hour to
wait for Phuong and living company. It was
strange how disturbed I had been by Vigot’s visit.
It was as though a poet had brought me his work
to criticise and through some careless action I had
destroyed it. I was a man without a vocation — one

222

cannot seriously consider journalism as a vocation,
but I could recognise a vocation in another. Now
that Vigot was gone to close his uncompleted file,
I wished I had the courage to call him back and
say, “You arc right. I did see Pyle the night he

CHAPTER II

(0

C)n the way to the Quai Mytho I passed several
ambulances driving out of Cholon heading for the
Place Gamier. One could almost reckon the pace of
rumour from the expression of the faces in the street,
which at first turned on someone like myself coming
from the direction of the Place with looks of expect-
ancy and speculation. By the time I entered Cholon
I had outstripped the news: life was busy, normal,
uninterrupted: nobody knew.

I found Mr. Chou’s godown and mounted to Mr.
Chou’s house. Nothing had changed since my last
visit. Tl^e cat and the dog moved from floor to
cardboard box to suitcase, like a couple of chess
knights who cannot get to grips. The baby crawled
on the floor, and the two old men were still playing
mah jongg. Only the young people were absent.
As soon as I appeared in the doorway one of the
women began to pour out tea. The old lady sat
on the bed and looked at her feet.

“M. Hcng,” I asked. I shook my head at the tea:
I wasn’t in the mood to begin another long course
of that trivial bitter brew. “II faut absolument que
jc voie M. Heng.” It seemed impossible to convey
to them the urgency of my request, but perhaps the

224

very abruptness of my refusal of tea caused some
disquiet. Or perhaps like Pyle I had blood on my
shoes. Anyway after a short delay one of the women
led me out and down the stairs, along two bustling
bannered streets and left me before what they would
have called I suppose in Pyle’s country a “funeral
parlour”, full of stone jars in which the resurrected
bones of the Chinese dead are eventually placed.
“M. Hcng,” I said to an old Chinese in the doorway,
“M. Hcng.” It seemed a suitable halting place on a
day which had begun with the planter’s erotic
collection and continued with the murdered bodies
in the square. Somebody called from an inner room
and the Chinese stepped aside and let me in.

Hcng himself came cordially forward ancl ushered
me into a little inner room lined with the black
carved uncomfortable chairs you find in every
Chinese ante-room, unused, unwelcoming. But I
had the sense that on this occasion the chairs had
been employed, for there were five little tea-cups on
the table, and two were not empty. “I have inter-
rupted a meeting,” I said.

“A matter of business,” Mr. Heng said evasively,
“of no importance . I am always glad to see you,
Mr. Fowler.”

“I’ve come from the Place Gamier,” I said.

*“I thought that was it.”

“You’ve heard . . .”

“Someone telephoned to me. It was thought best
that I keep away from Mr. Chou’s for a while. The
police will be very active today.”

“But you had nothing to do with it.”

“It is the business of the pulice to find a culprit.”

225

“It was Pyle again,” I said.

“Yes.”

“It was a terrible thing to do.”

“General Th£ is not a very controlled character.”

“And plastic isn’t for boys from Boston. Who is
Pyle’s chief, Heng?”

“I h^ve the impression that Mr. Pyle is very much
his own master.”

“What is he? O.S.S.?”

“The initial letters are not very important.”

“What can I do, Heng? He’s got to be stopped.”

“You can publish the truth. Or perhaps you
cannot?”

“My paper’s not interested in General The. They
arc only interested in your people, Heng.”

“You really want Mr. Pyle stopped, Mr. Fowler?”

“If you’d seen him, Heng. He stood there and
said it was all a sad mistake, there should have been
a parade. He said he’d have to get his shoes cleaned
before he saw the Minister.”

“Of course, you could tell what you know to the
police.”

“They aren’t interested in The either. And do you
think they would dare to touch an American? He
has diplomatic privileges. He’s a graduate of
Harvard. The Minister’s very fond of Pyle. Heng,
there was a woman there whose baby — she kept it
covered under her straw hat. I can’t get it out of my
head. And there was another in Phat Diem.”

“You must try to be calm, Mr. Fowler.”

“What’ll he do next, Heng? How many bombs
and dead children can you get out of a drum of
Diolacton?”

226

"Would you be prepared to help us, Mr. Fowler?”

“He comes blundering in and people have to die*
for his mistakes. I wish your people had got him
on the river from Nam Dinh. It would have made
a lot of difference to a lot of lives.”

“I agree with you, Mr. Fowler. He has to be
restrained. I have a suggestion to make^’ Some-
body coughed delicately behind the door, then
noisily spat. He said, “If you would invite him to
dinner tonight at the Vicux Moulin. Between
eight-thirty and nine-thirty.”

“What good . . . ?”

“Wc would talk to him on the way,” Heng said.

"He may be engaged.”

"Perhaps it would be better if you asked him to
call on you — at six-thirty. He will be free then: he
will certainly come. If he is able to have dinner
with you, take a book to your window as though
you want to catch the light.”

“Why the Vieux Moulin?”

“It is by the bridge to Dakow — I think we shall
be able to find a spot and talk undisturbed.”

“What will you do?”

“You do not want to know that, Mr. Fowler. But
I promise you we will act as gently as the situation
allows.”

The unseen friends of Heng shifted like rats behind
the wall. “Will you do this for us, Mr. Fowler?”

"1 don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Sooner or later,” Heng said, and I was reminded
of Captain Trouin speaking in the opium-house, "one
has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”

227

( 2 )

I left a note at the Legation asking Pyle to come
and then I went up the street to the Continental for
a drink. The wreckage was all cleared away; the
fire-brigade had hosed the square. I had no idea
then how the time and the place would become
important. I even thought of sitting there through-
out the evening and breaking my appointment.
Then I thought that perhaps I could frighten Pyle
into inactivity by warning him of his danger —
whatever his danger was, and so I finished my beer
and went home, and when I reached home I began
to hope that Pyle would not come. I tried to read,
but there was nothing on my shelves to hold the
attention. Perhaps I should have smoked, but there
was no one to prepare my pipe. I listened unwillingly
for footsteps and at last they came. Somebody
knocked. I opened the door, but it was only
Domingupz.

1 said, “What do you want, Dominguez?”

He looked at me with an air of surprise. “Want?”
He looked at his watch. “This is the time I always
come. Have you any cables?”

“I’m sorry — I’d forgotten. No.”

“But a follow-up on the bomb? Don’t you want
something filed?”

“Oh, work one out for me, Dominguez. I don’t
know how it is — being there on the spot, perhaps I
got a bit shocked. I can’t think of the thing in terms
of a cable.” I hit out at a mosquito which came
droning at my car and saw Dominguez wince

228

instinctively at my blow. “It’s all right, Dominguez,
I missed it.” He grinned miserably. He could not
justify this reluctance to take life: after all he was a
Christian — one of those who had learnt from Nero
how to make human bodies into candles.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked.
He didn’t drink, he didn’t eat meat, he didn’t kill —
^ envied him the ge ntleness of his mind.

“No, Dominguez. Just leave me alone tonight.”
I watched him from the window, going away across
the rue Catinat. A trishaw-driver had parked beside
the pavement just opposite my window; Dominguez
tried to engage him but the man shook his head.
Presumably he was waiting for a client in one of the
shops, for this was not a parking place for trishaws.
When I looked at my watch it was strange to see that
I had been waiting for little more than ten minutes,
and, when Pyle knocked, I hadn’t this time even
heard his step.

“Come in.” But as usual it was the dog that came
in first.

“I was glad to get your note, Thomas. This
morning I thought you were mad at me.”

“Perhaps I wa c It wasn’t a pretty sight.”

“You know so much now, it won’t hurt to tell
you a bit more. I saw The this afternoon.”

* “Saw him? Is he in Saigon? I suppose he came
to see how his bomb worked.”

“That’s in confidence, Thomas. I dealt with him
very severely.” He spoke like the captain of a
school-team who has found one of his boys breaking
his training. All the same I asked him with a certain
hope, “Have you thrown him over?”

229

“I told him that if he made another uncontrolled
demonstration we would have no more to do with
him.”

“But haven’t you finished with him already, Pyle?”
I pushed impatiently at his dog which was nosing
around my ankles.

“I cafi’t. (Sit down, Duke.) In the long run he’s
the only hope we have. If he came to power with
our help, we could rely on him . .

“How many people have to die before you
realise . . . ?” But I could tell that it was a hopeless
argument.

“Realise what, Thomas?”

“That there’s no such thing as gratitude in
politics.”

“At least they won’t hate us like they hate the
French.”

“Are you sure? Sometimes we have a kind of
love for our enemies and sometimes we feel hate for
our friends.”

“You /talk like a European, Thomas. These
people aren’t complicated.”

“Is that what you’ve learned in a few months?
You’ll be calling them childlike next.”

“Well ... in a way.”

“Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle. When
we are young we are a jungle of complications. We
simplify as we get older.” But what good was it
to talk to him? There was an unreality in both
our arguments. I was becoming a leader-writer
before my time. I got up and went to the book-
shelf.

“What are you looking for, Thomas?”

230

“Oh, just a passage I used to be fond of. Can you
have dinner with me, Pyle?”

“I’d love to, Thomas. I’m so glad you aren’t mad
any longer. I know you disagree with me, but we
can disagree, can’t we, and be friends?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“After all, Phuong was much more imoortant
than this.”

“Do you really believe that, Pyle?”

“Why, she’s the most important thing there is.
To me. And to you, Thomas.”

“Not to me any longer.”

“It was a terrible shock today, Thomas, but in a
week, you’ll see, we’ll have forgotten it. We are
looking after the relatives too.”

“We?”

“We’ve wired to Washington. We’ll get permission
to use some of our funds.”

I interrupted him. “The Vieux Moulin? Between
nine and nine-thirty?”

“Where you like, Thomas.” I went to the window.
The sun had sunk below the roofs. The trishaw
driver still waited for his fare. I looked down at
him and he raised his face to me.

“Are you waiting for someone, Thomas?”

“No. There was just a piece I was looking for.”
To cover my action 1 rea l, holding the book up to
the last light:

“I drive through the streets and I care not a
damn,

The people they stare, and they ask who I am;

And if I should chance to run over a cad,

231

I can pay for the damage if ever so bad.

So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!

So pleasant it is to have money.”

“That’s a funny kind of poem,” Pyle said with a
note of disapproval.

“He was an adult poet in the nineteenth century.
There weren’t so maiiy of them.” I looked down
into the street again. The trishaw-driver had moved
away.

“Have you run out of drink?” Pyle asked.

“No, but 1 thought you didn’t . . .”

“Perhaps I’m beginning to loosen up,” Pyle said.
“Your influence. I guess you’re good for me,
Thomas.”

1 got the bottle and glasses — I forgot one of them
the first journey and then I had to go back for water.
Everything that 1 did that evening tqpk a long time.
He said, “You know, I’ve got a wonderful family, but
maybe they were a bit on the strict side. We have
one of thqsc old houses in Chestnut Street, as you go
up the nill on the right-hand side. My mother
collects glass, and my father — when he’s not eroding
his old cliffs — picks up all the Darwin manuscripts
and association copies he can. You see, they live
in the past. Maybe that’s why York made such an
impression on me. He seemed kind of open to
modem conditions. My father’s an isolationist.”

“Perhaps I would like your father,” I said. “I’m
an isolationist too.”

For a quiet man Pyle that night was in a talking
mood. I didn’t hear all that he said, for my mind
was elsewhere. I tried to persuade myself that Mr.

232

Heng had other means at his disposal but the crude
and obvious one. But in a war like this, I knew,
there is no time to hesitate: one uses the weapon to
hand — the French the napalm bomb, Mr. Heng the
bullet or the knife. I told myself too late that 1
wasn’t made to be a judge — I would let Pyle talk
awhile and then I would warn him. He could spend
the night in my house. They would hardly break in
there. I think he was speaking of the old nurse he
had had — “She really meant more to me than my
mother, and the blueberry pies she used to make!”
when I interrupted him. “Do you carry a gun
now — since that night?”

“No. We have orders in the Legation . . .”

“But you’re on special duties?”

“It wouldn’t do any good — if they wanted to get
me, they always could. Anyway I’m as blind as a
coot. At college they called me Bat — because I
could see in the dark as well as they could. Once
when we were fooling around . . .” He was off again.
I returned to the window.

A trishaw-driver waited opposite. I wasn’t sure —
they look so much alike, but T thought he was a
different one. Perhaps he really had a client. It
occurred to me that Pyle would be safest at the
Legation. They must have laid their plans, since
fhy signal, for later in the evening: something that
involved the Dakow bridge. 1 couldn’t understand
why or how: surely he would not be so foolish as
to drive through Dakow after sunset and our side of
the bridge was always guarded by armed police.

“I’m doing all the talking,” Pyle said. “I don’t
know how it is, but somehow this evening . . .”

233

“Go on,” I said, “I’m in a quiet mood, that’s all.

’Perhaps we’d better cancel that dinner.”

“No, don’t do that. I’ve felt cut off from you,
since . . . well . . .”

“Since you saved my life,” I said and couldn’t
disguise the bitterness of my self-inflicted wound.

“No, I didn’t mean that. All the same how we
talked, didn’t we, that night? As if it was going to
be our last. I learned a lot about you, Thomas. I
don’t agree with you, mind, but for you maybe
it’s right — not being involved. You kept it up all
right, even after your leg was smashed you stayed
neutral.”

“There’s always a point of change,” I said. “Some’
moment of emotion . . .”

“You haven’t reached it yet. I doubt if you ever
will. And I’m not likely to change either — except
with death,” he added merrily.

“Not even with this morning? Mightn’t that
change a man’s views?”

“They ^were only war casualties,” he said. “It
was a pity, but you can’t always hit your target.
Anyway they died in the right cause.”

“Would you have said the same if it had been
your old nurse with her blueberry pie?”

He ignored my facile point. “In a way you could
say they died for Democracy,” he said. *

“I wouldn’t know how to translate that into
Vietnamese.” I was suddenly very tired. I wanted
him to go away quickly and die. Then I could start
life again — at the point before he came in.

“You’ll never take me seriously, will you,
Thomas,” he complained, with that schoolboy

234

gaiety which he seemed to have kept up his sleeve
for this night of all nights. “I tell you what—
Phuong’s at the cinema — what about you and me
spending the whole evening together? I’ve nothing
to do now.” It was as though someone from outside
were directing him how to choose his words in
order to rob me of any possible excuse. JHc went
on, “Why don’t wc go to the Chalet? I haven’t been
there since that night. The food is just as good as
the Vieux Moulin, and there’s music.”

I said, “I’d rather not remember that night.”

“I’m sorry. I’m a dumb fool sometimes, Thomas.
What about a Chinese dinner in Cholon?”

“To get a good one you have to order in advance.
Arc you scared of the Vieux Moulin, Pyle? It’s well
wired and there are always police on the bridge.
And you wouldn’t be such a fool, would you, as to
drive through Dakow?”

“It wasn’t that. I just thought it would be fun
tonight to make a long evening of it.”

He made a movement and upset his glass, which
smashed upon the floor. “Good luck,” he said
mechanically. “I’m sorry, Thomas.” 1 began to
pick up the pieces and pack them into the ash-tray.
“What about it, Thomas?” The smashed glass
reminded me of the bottles in the Pavilion bar
"dripping their contents. “I warned Phuong I
might be out with you.” How badly chosen was
the word ‘warn’. I picked up the last piece of glass.
“I have got an engagement at the Majestic,” I said,
“and I can’t manage before nine.”

“Well, I guess I’ll have to go back to the office.
Only I’m always afraid of getting caught.”

235

There was no harm in giving him that one
chance. “Don’t mind being late,” I said. “If you
do get caught, look in here later. I’ll come back
at ten, if you can’t make dinner, and wait for
you.”

“I’ll let you know . . .”

“Don’^ bother. Just come to the Vieux Moulin —
or meet me here.” 1 handed back the decision to
that somebody in whom I didn’t believe: you can
intervene if you want to: a telegram on his desk: a
message from the Minister. You cannot exist unless
you have the power to alter the future. “Go away
now, Pyle. There are things I have to do.” I lelt a
strange exhaustion, hearing him go away and the
pad of his dog’s paws.

( 3 )

There were no trishaw drivers nearer than the
Rue d’Ormay when I went out. I walked down to
the Majestic and stood awhile watching the unloading
of the Afnerican bombers. The sun had gone and
they worked by the light of arc lamps. I had no idea
of creating an alibi, but I had told Pyle I w'as going
to the Majestic and I felt an unreasoning dislike of
telling more lies than were needed.

“Evening, Fowler.” It was Wilkins.

“Evening.”

“How’s the leg?”

“No trouble now.”

“Got a good story filed?”

“I left it to Dominguez.”

“Oh, they told me you were there.”

236

“Yes, I was. But space is tight these days. They
won’t want much.”

“The spice has gone out of the dish, hasn’t it,”
Wilkins said. “We ought to have lived in the days
of Russell and the old Times. Dispatches by
balloon. One had time to do some fancy writing
then. Why, he’d even have made a colurngi out of
this. The luxury hotel, the bombers, night falling.
Night never falls nowadays does it, at so many
piastres a word.” From far up in the sky you could
faintly hear the noise of laughter: somebody broke
a glass as Pyle had done. The sound fell on us like
icicles. “The lamps shone o’er fair women and
brave men,” Wilkins malevolently quoted. “Doing
am^iftffCmight, Fowler? Care for a spot of dinner?”

“I’m dining as it is. At the Vieux Moulin.”

“I wish you joy. Granger will be there. They
ought to advertise special Granger nights. For those
who like background noise.”

I said good -night to him and went into the cinema
next door — Errol Flynn, or it may have been Tyrone
Power (I don’t know how to distinguish them in
tights), swung on ropes and leapt from balconies and
rode bareback into technicolor dawns. He rescued
a girl and killed his enemy and led a charmed life.
It was what they call a film for boys, but the sight of
(fedipus emerging with his bleeding eyeballs from
the palace at Thebes would surely give a better
training for life today. No life is charmed. Luck
had been with Pyle at Phat Diem and on the road
from Tanyin, but luck doesn’t last, and they had
two hours to see that no charm worked. A French
soldier sat beside me with his hand in a girl’s lap,

237

and I envied the simplicity of his happiness or his
misery, whichever it might be. I left before the film
was over and took a trishaw to the Vieux Moulin.

The restaurant was wired in against grenades
and two armed policemen were on duty at the end
of the bridge. The patron, who had grown fat on his
own rijh Burgundian cooking, let me through the
wire himself. The place smelt of capons and melting
butter in the heavy evening heat.

“Are you joining the party of M. Granjair?” he
asked me.

“No.”

“A table for one?” It was then for the first time
that I thought of the future and the questions I
might have to answer. “For one,” I said, and it was
almost as though I had said aloud that Pyle was
dead.

There was only one room and (granger’s party
occupied a large table at the back; the patron gave
me a small one closest to the wire. There were no
window panes, for fear of splintered glass. I recog-
nised a few of the people Granger was entertaining,
and I bowed to them before I sat down: Granger
himself looked away. I hadn’t seen him for months
— only once since the night Pyle fell in love. Perhaps
some offensive remark I had made that evening had
penetrated the alcoholic fog, for he sat scowling at
the head of the table while Mine. Desprez, the wife
of a public relations officer, and Captain Duparc of
the Press Liaison Service nodded and becked. There
was a big man whom I think was a hotelier from
Pnom Penh and a French girl I’d never seen before
and two or three other faces that I had only observed

238

in bars. It seemed for once to be a quiet party.

I ordered a pastis because I wanted to give Pyle
time to come— plans go awry and so long as I did
not begin to eat my dinner it was as though I still
had time to hope. And then I wondered what I
hoped for. Good luck to the O.S.S. or whatever his
gang were called? Long life to plastic bombs and
General The? Or did 1 — I of all people— nope for
some kind of miracle: a method of discussion arranged
by Mr. Hong which wasn’t simply death? How much
easier it would have been if we had both been killed
on the road from Tanyin. I sat for twenty minutes
over my pastis and then I ordered dinner. It would
soon be hall past nine: he wouldn’t come now.

Against my will I listened: for what? a scream? a
shot? some movement by the police outsille? but in
any case I would probably hear nothing, for
Granger’s party was warming up. The hotelier, who
had a pleasant untrained voice, began to sing and
as a new champagne cork popped others joined in,
but not Granger. He sat there with raw eyes glaring
across the room at me. I wondered if there would
be a fight: I was no match for Granger.

They were singing a sentimental song, and as I
sat hungerless over my apology for a Chapon due
Charles I thought, for the first time since I had
Tcnown that she was safe, of Phuong. I remembered
how Pyle, sitting on the floor waiting for the Viets,
had said, “She seems fresh like a flower,” and I had
flippantly replied, “Poor flower.” She would never
see New England now or learn the secrets of
Canasta. Perhaps she would never know security:
what right had I to value her less than the dead

239

bodies in the square? Suffering is not increased by-
numbers: one body can contain all the suffering the
world can feel. I had judged like a journalist in
terms of quantity and I had betrayed my own
principles; I had become as engagi as Pyle, and it
seemed to me that no decision would ever be simple
again, ^looked at my watch and it was nearly a
quarter to ten. Perhaps, after all, he had been
caught; perhaps that ‘someone’ in whom he believed
had acted on his behalf and he sat now in his
Legation room fretting at a telegram to decode, and
soon he would come stamping up the stairs to my
room in the rue Catinat. I thought, ‘If he does I
shall tell him everything.’

Granger suddenly got up from his table and came
at me. He didn’t even see the chair in his way and he
stumbled and laid his hand on the edge of my table.
“Fowler,” he said, “come outside.” J laid enough
notes down and followed him. I was in no mood to
fight with him, but at that moment I would not have
minded if he had beaten me unconscious. We have
so few ways in which to assuage the sense of guilt.

He leant on the parapet of the bridge and the two
policemen watched him from a distance. He said,
“I’ve got to talk to you, Fowler.”

I came within striking distance and waited. He
didn’t move. He was like an emblematic statue ot
all I thought I hated in America — as ill-designed as
the Statue of Liberty and as meaningless. He said
without moving, “You think I’m pissed. You’re
wrong.”

“What’s up, Granger?”

“I got to talk to you, Fowler. I don’t want to sit

240

there with those Frogs tonight. I don’t like you,
Fowler, but you talk English. A kind of English.”
He leant there, bulky and shapeless in the half-
light, an unexplored continent.

“What do you want, Granger?”

“I don’t like Limies,” Granger said. “I don’t
know why Pyle stomachs you. Maybe it’s* because
he’s Boston. I’m Pittsburgh and proud of it.”

“Why not?”

“There you are again.” He made a feeble attempt
to mock my accent. “You all talk like poufs. You’re
so damned superior. You think you know every-
thing.”

“Good-night, Granger. I’ve got an .appointment.”

“Don’t go, Fowler. Haven’t you got a heart? I
can’t talk to those Froggies.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’ve had two glasses of champagne, that’s all,
and wouldn’t you be drunk in my place? I’ve got
to go north.”

“What’s wrong in that?”

“Oh, I didn’t tell you, did I? I keep on thinking
everyone knows. I got a cable this morning from
my wife.”

“Yes?”

“My son’s got polio. He’s bad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You needn’t be. It’s not your kid.”

“Can’t you fly home?”

“I can’t. They want a story about some damned
mopping-up operations near Hanoi and Connolly's
sick.” (Connolly was his assistant.)

“I’m sorry, Granger. I wish I could help.”

241

“It’s his birthday tonight. He’s eight at half past
ten our time. That’s why I laid on a party with
champagne before I knew. I had to tell someone,
Fowler, and I can’t tell these Froggies.”

“They can do a lot for polio nowadays.”

“I don’t mind if he’s crippled, Fowler. Not if he
lives. ]\^e, I’d be no good crippled, but he’s got
brains. Do you know what I’ve been doing in there
while that bastard was singing? I was praying. I
thought maybe if God wanted a life he could take
mine.”

“Do you believe in a God, then?”

“I wish I did,” Granger said. He passed his whole
hand across his face as though his head ached, but
the motion was meant to disguise the fact that he
was wiping tears away.

“I’d get drunk if I were you,” I said.

“Oh no, I’ve got to stay sober. I don’t want to
think afterwards I was stinking drunk the night my
boy died. My wife can’t drink, can she?”

“Can’t you tell your paper . . .?”

“Connolly’s not really sick. He’s off after a bit
of tail in Singapore. I’ve got to cover for him. He’d
be sacked if they knew.” He gathered his shapeless
body together. “Sorry I kept you, Fowler. I just
had to tell someone. Got to go in now and start
the toasts. Funny it happened to be you, and you
hate my guts.”

“I’d do your story for you. I could pretend it was
Connolly.”

“You wouldn’t get the accent right.”

“I don’t dislike you, Granger. I’ve been blind to
a lot of things . . .”

242

“Oh, you and me, we’re cat and dog. But
thanks for the sympathy.”

Was I so different from Pyle, I wondered? Must
I too have my foot thrust in the mess of life before I
saw the pain? Granger went inside and I could hear
the voices rising to greet him. I found a trishaw and
was pedalled home. There was nobody thgre, and I
sat and waited till midnight. Then I went down
into the street without hope and found Phuong there.

243

CHAPTER III

“Has M. Vigot been to see you?” Phuong asked.

“Yes. He left a quarter of an hour ago. Was the
film good?” She had already laid out the tray in the
bedroom and now she was lighting the lamp.

“It was very sad,” she said, “but the colours were
lovely. What did M. Vigot want?”

“He wanted to ask me some questions.”

“What about?”

“This and that. I don’t think he will bother me
again.”

“I like films with happy endings best,” Phuong
said. “Arc you ready to smoke?”

“Yes.” I lay down on the bed and Phuong set
to work with her needle. She said, “They cut off
the girl’s head.”

“What a strange thing to do.”

“It was in the French Revolution.”

“Oh. Historical. I see.”

“It was very sad all the same.”

“I can’t worry much about people in history.”

“And her lover — he went back to liis garret — and
he was miserable and he wrote a song — you set*, he
was a poet, and soon all the people who had cut off
the head of his girl were singing his song. It was the
Marseillaise.”

“It doesn’t sound very historical,” I said.

244

“He stood there at the edge of the crowd while
they were singing, and he looked very bitter and
when he smiled you knew he was even more bitter
and that he was thinking of her. I cried a lot and
so did my sister.”

“Your sister? I can’t believe it.”

“She is very sensitive. That horrid man Granger
was there. He was drunk and he kept on laughing.
But it was not funny at all. It was sad.”

“I don’t blame him,” I said. “He has something
to celebrate. His son’s out of danger. I heard
today at the Continental. I like happy endings
too.”

After I had smoked two pipes I lay back with my
neck on the leather pillow and rested my hand in
Phuong’s lap. “Are you happy?”

“Of course,” she said carelessly. I hadn’t deserved
a more considered answer.

“It’s like it used to be,” I lied, “a year ago.”

“Yes.”

“You haven’t bought a scarf for a long time. Why
don’t you go shopping tomorrow?”

“It is a feast day.”

“Oh yes, of course. I forgot.”

“You haven’t opened your telegram,” Phuong
said.

“No, I’d forgotten that too. I don’t want to think
about work tonight. Ana it’s too late to file any-
thing now. Tell me more about the film.”

“Well, her lover tried to rescue her from prison.
He smuggled in boy’s clothes and a man’s cap like
the one the gaoler wore, but just as she was passing
the gate all her hair fell J nvn and they called out

245

‘Une aristocrate, une aristocrate.’ I think that
was a mistake in the story. They ought to have let
her escape. Then they would both have made a lot
of money with his song and they would have gone
abroad to America — or England,” she added with
what she thought was cunning.

“I’d better read the telegram,” I said. “I hope to
God I don’t have to go north tomorrow. I want to
be quiet with you.”

She loosed the envelope from among the pots of
cream and gave it to me. I opened it and read:
“Have thought over your letter again stop am acting
irrationally as you hoped stop have told my lawyer
start divorce proceedings grounds desertion stop God
bless you affectionately Helen.”

“Do you have to go?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t have to go. Read it. Here’s
your happy ending.”

She jumped from the bed. “But it is wonderful.
I must go and tell my sister. She’ll be so pleased.
I will say to her, ‘Do you know who I am? I am the
second Mrs. Foulaire.’ ”

Opposite me in the bookcase The Role of the West
stood out like a cabinet portrait — of a young man
with a crew cut and a black dog at his heels. He
could harm no one any more. I said to Phuong,
“Do you miss him much?”

“Who?”

“Pyle.” Strange how even now, e\en to her, it was
impossible to use his first name.

“Can I go, please? My sister will be so excited.”

“You spoke his name once in your sleep.”

“I never remember my dreams.”

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“There was so much you could have done together
He was young.”

“You are not old.”

“The skyscrapers. The Empire State Building.”

She said with a small hesitation, “I want to see the
Cheddar Gorge.”

“It isn’t the Grand Canyon.” I pulled her down
on to the bed. “I’m sorry, Phuong.”

“What are you sorry for? It is a wonderful
telegram. My sister . . .”

“Yes, go and tell your sister. Kiss mi- first.” Her
excited mouth skated over my face, and she was
gone.

I thought of the first day and Pyle sitting beside
me at the Continental, with his eye on the soda-
fountain across the way. Everything had gone
right with me since he had died, but how I wished
there existed someone to whom I could say that
I was sorry.

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